Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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 experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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.
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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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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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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’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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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY