Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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 think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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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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.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY