Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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 a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY