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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Seamus Heaney

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intense Language Myself Poem Reading Talk Thinking
The 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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrival Fact Life Miracle Myself Poetry
The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art End One Liner Peace
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fake Intense Poetry Utter
I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intelligence Natural Politics Thinking
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Conscious Instruction Need Realize
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Fall Habit Myself
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Beautiful Injustice Situation Violence
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Life Poetry Yourself
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Father Myself World
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Form Movement One Liner
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Command Move Success
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrangement Aware Old Problem Trick
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Family Farm Funeral Kind Representation Work
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Argument Aristocrats Behavior God Talk
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Finding Kind Poet Public Value
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dangerous Feeling Mortal Order Yourself
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Deep Fake Feeling Imagination Sin
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Award Judgement Panel Poetry Solidarity Yourself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Generation Important Myself University Win
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Amount Culture Growth Help Material Myself System Thinking
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Children Father Mom Myself
My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Equal Evidence Experience Writing
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY

One Liner Path Poetry
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Thinking
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dimension God Language Personal Promise Reality Yearning
I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Association Expectation Moments Reward

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

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