I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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
-
-
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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 -
But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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 -
Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY