Seamus Heaney Quotes

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

I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

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.

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