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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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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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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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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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.
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The end of art is peace.
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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.
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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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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
SEAMUS HEANEY