A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is more a threshold than a path.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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