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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

Seamus Heaney

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Beautiful Injustice Situation Violence
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 HEANEY

Expectation Experiment Myself Poetry Reason
The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art End One Liner Peace
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intense Language Myself Poem Reading Talk Thinking
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Citizenship Note Positive Reading Sin Writing
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Career Farm Teaching
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Learning Poem Poetry Quite Student Workshop
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Translation
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrival Fact Life Miracle Myself Poetry
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Amount Culture Growth Help Material Myself System Thinking
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Group Necessary Sustainable Writing
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hope Maintain Start Yourself
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identify Passport Yourself
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Children Father Mom Myself
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Habit Help Myself People
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Eternity Forever Kind Quality Small Time Truth

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

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Popular Authors

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