I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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If 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.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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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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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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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The 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.
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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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