The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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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 a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Write whatever you like!
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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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.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
SEAMUS HEANEY