It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEYHistory says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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