Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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 suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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The end of art is peace.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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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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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.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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