The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
SEAMUS HEANEYNowadays, 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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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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 always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY