If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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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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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.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY