I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
SEAMUS HEANEYI credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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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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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 poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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.
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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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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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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 came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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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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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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 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