There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 -
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEY