I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEYAs a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY