As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEYThen as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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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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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY