I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEYSince 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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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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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.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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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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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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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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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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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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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