In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEYI suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
SEAMUS HEANEY