At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEYI have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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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 have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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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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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY