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.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY