As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEYI don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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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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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY