In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems 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 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.
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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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