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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Then 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.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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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 more a threshold than a path.
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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.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY