A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEYHistory says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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.
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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.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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 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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY