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.
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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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.
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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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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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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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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY