Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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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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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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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY