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 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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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 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.
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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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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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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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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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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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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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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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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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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
SEAMUS HEANEY