I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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 HEANEYIt 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 HEANEYPoetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEYIf you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
SEAMUS HEANEYA public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEYEven if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEYWithout needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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 HEANEYAt home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEYAnybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy 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.
SEAMUS HEANEYA person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
SEAMUS HEANEY