One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEYAs writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY