black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Seamus Heaney

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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Career Farm Teaching
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Forever Life
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Attitude Authority Avoid Figure Habit Home
I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mail Morning Myself
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Group Poetry Position
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Form Movement One Liner
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Empowerment Expectation Forget Gift Writing Yourself
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Born Optimistic
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Command Move Success
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complete Crisis Intimate Isolation Poetry
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Help Imagination Myself
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fake Intense Poetry Utter
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Associate Creature Family Father Traditional World
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY

One Liner Path Poetry

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Seamus Heaney Quotes