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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

Seamus Heaney

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Deep Fake Feeling Imagination Sin
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fake Intense Poetry Utter
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Need Poet Public Young Yourself
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Country Known Unity Yourself
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Habit Help Myself People
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Possible Space Walk
I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mail Morning Myself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Solid Stress True Work Writing
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Attitude Authority Avoid Figure Habit Home
I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intelligence Natural Politics Thinking
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Career Farm Teaching
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intense Language Myself Poem Reading Talk Thinking
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion
Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Old Recognition Taunt Young
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Generation Important Myself University Win
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Eyes Poem Reading Time Voice

My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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