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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.

Seamus Heaney

The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrangement Aware Old Problem Trick
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Risk Truth World Yourself
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Thinking
Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Old Recognition Taunt Young
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Attitude Authority Avoid Figure Habit Home
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Learning Poem Poetry Quite Student Workshop
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Bright Interesting Life Myself Reflection Thinking Water
The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art End One Liner Peace
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Award Judgement Panel Poetry Solidarity Yourself
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grow Manifestation Order Poetry Store
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Break Death Poetry
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Finding Kind Poet Public Value
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Difficult Heart Learning Rhyme
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mystery Poetry Relationship Slight
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caution Natural Person
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Career Farm Teaching
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Generation Important Myself University Win
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Conscious Instruction Need Realize
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identify Passport Yourself
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Command Move Success
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fact Lyrics Medium Poetry Recognition Truth
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caste Loyalty Operation Religion System
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Possible Space Walk
I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Heart Learning
It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Solid Stress True Work Writing
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Goddess Myself Territory Thinking
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion

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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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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