If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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 Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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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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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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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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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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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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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY