Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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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 experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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 spend almost every morning with mail.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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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 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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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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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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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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