The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is more a threshold than a path.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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Write whatever you like!
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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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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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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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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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY