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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY

One Liner Path Poetry
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Family Farm Funeral Kind Representation Work
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Thinking
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Command Move Success
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caste Loyalty Operation Religion System
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Help Imagination Myself
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hurt Murder Myself Soul
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complete Crisis Intimate Isolation Poetry
I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Heart Learning
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hope Maintain Start Yourself
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Attitude Authority Avoid Figure Habit Home
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Possible Space Walk
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Argument Aristocrats Behavior God Talk
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mystery Poetry Relationship Slight
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Experiment Kind Myself Poetry Programme Writing
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Seamus Heaney Quotes