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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.

Seamus Heaney

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 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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Experiment Kind Myself Poetry Programme Writing
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Risk Truth World Yourself
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
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
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
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Solid Stress True Work Writing
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
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Born Optimistic
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dangerous Feeling Mortal Order Yourself
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Beginning Life Myself Thinking Wide
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY

One Liner Path Poetry
I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Heart Learning
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Difficult Heart Learning Rhyme
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’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

Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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