I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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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.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY