It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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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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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEY