In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
SEAMUS HEANEYAs a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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 would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEY