You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEYOne of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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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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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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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.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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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 think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
SEAMUS HEANEY