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.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is more a threshold than a path.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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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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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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