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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

Seamus Heaney

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complication Factor Myself Point Talk
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Group Necessary Sustainable Writing
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Help Imagination Myself
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Possible Space Walk
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Attitude Authority Avoid Figure Habit Home
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Conscious Imagination Myself People Poet
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

Marriage Peace Personal Politics
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Country Known Unity Yourself
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Design Fear Finding Myself Place Superstition Writing
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Finding Kind Poet Public Value
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Father Myself World
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Home Myself Reading Time
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
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
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Absolute Admire Greatness Lyrics Poetry

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

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