When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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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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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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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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 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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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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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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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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