Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEYAnyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe 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 HEANEYI suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
SEAMUS HEANEYManifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEYWithout needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEYI have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn 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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEYWe go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY