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I’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.

Seamus Heaney

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fact Lyrics Medium Poetry Recognition Truth
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
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Case Chapter History Poetry
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fundamental Memories Myself Poem Start
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
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Myself Writing
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complete Crisis Intimate Isolation Poetry
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Form Movement One Liner
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Big Listening Myself Speaker
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
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Need Poet Public Young Yourself
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Empowerment Expectation Forget Gift Writing Yourself
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Academy Foundation Mindset Myself Name
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Design Fear Finding Myself Place Superstition Writing
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
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Born Optimistic

I’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.

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Popular Authors

I’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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Seamus Heaney Quotes