The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEYAnybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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The end of art is peace.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY