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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.

Seamus Heaney

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Domestic Home Poetry
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Experiment Kind Myself Poetry Programme Writing
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hope Maintain Start Yourself
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
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
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Learning Poem Poetry Quite Student Workshop
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fake Intense Poetry Utter
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Habit Help Myself People
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 have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Beginning Life Myself Thinking Wide
If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dimension Ghost People Pleasant Quiet Training Yourself
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Myself Writing
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
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Goddess Myself Territory Thinking
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
Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Old Recognition Taunt Young

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Seamus Heaney Quotes