The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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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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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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The end of art is peace.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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.
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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