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.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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Write whatever you like!
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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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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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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The end of art is peace.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY