The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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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 think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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The end of art is peace.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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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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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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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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