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
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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.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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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.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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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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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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