The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 -
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEY