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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

Seamus Heaney

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Beautiful Injustice Situation Violence
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Conscious Imagination Myself People Poet
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Case Chapter History Poetry
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Amount Culture Growth Help Material Myself System Thinking
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Group Poetry Position
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dimension God Language Personal Promise Reality Yearning
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Solid Stress True Work Writing
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fact Lyrics Medium Poetry Recognition Truth
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Habit Help Myself People
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

Better Famous Myself Talk
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Life Poetry Yourself
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

Myself Old Recognition Taunt Young
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Domestic Home Poetry
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

Community Deep Feeling Joy Moments Myself
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Civilization Improvement
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Achievement Hard Poetry Serious Worth

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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