I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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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.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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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.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Write whatever you like!
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEY