Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Write whatever you like!
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY