As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEYAs a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEYI came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
SEAMUS HEANEYYou yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEYA person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
SEAMUS HEANEYMemory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEYWrite whatever you like!
SEAMUS HEANEYI have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEYI believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY