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 HEANEYWithout needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY