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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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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.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY