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 HEANEYIn fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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 fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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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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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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