Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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