Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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The end of art is peace.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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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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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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