In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEYI 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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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.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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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.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY