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.
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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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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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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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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 suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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