My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
SEAMUS HEANEY