Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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 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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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.
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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEY