I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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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 experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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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.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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.
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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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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEY