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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 HEANEY -
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY