As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEYAt home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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 feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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 credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY