As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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 end of art is peace.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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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.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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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 don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY