Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEYWithout needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 -
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY