Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEYIf poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY