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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

Seamus Heaney

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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Experiment Kind Myself Poetry Programme Writing
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Amount Culture Growth Help Material Myself System Thinking
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dimension Ghost People Pleasant Quiet Training Yourself
I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Death Light Myself Obsession Personally
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Oneself Poem Swift
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Literature Ourselves Poetry
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Childhood Disappointment Preparation Thinking
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hurt Murder Myself Soul
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Conscious Instruction Need Realize
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Eternity Forever Kind Quality Small Time Truth
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Translation
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Citizenship Note Positive Reading Sin Writing
I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Home Myself Reading Time
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Community Deep Feeling Joy Moments Myself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Associate Creature Family Father Traditional World
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Break Death Poetry

I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

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