I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEYI 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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