History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEYThe fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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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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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 poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY