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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

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion
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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Learning Poem Poetry Quite Student Workshop
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Break Death Poetry
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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Absolute Admire Greatness Lyrics Poetry
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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Dangerous Feeling Mortal Order Yourself
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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Marriage Peace Personal Politics
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Mystery Poetry Relationship Slight
Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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Deal Temperature World Writing
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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Expectation Group Poetry Position
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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Literature Ourselves Poetry
Write whatever you like!
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Advice Writing
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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Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Achievement Hard Poetry Serious Worth
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Grave History Hope Side
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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Eyes Poem Reading Time Voice
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

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

More Seamus Heaney Quotes