We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEYWrite whatever you like!
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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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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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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 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.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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 poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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Write whatever you like!
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY