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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

Seamus Heaney

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Childhood Disappointment Preparation Thinking
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Forever Life
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Career Farm Teaching
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Group Poetry Position
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

Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrival Fact Life Miracle Myself Poetry
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

Complete Crisis Intimate Isolation Poetry
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poet World
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Thinking
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 HEANEY

Family Farm Funeral Kind Representation Work
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

Intense Language Myself Poem Reading Talk Thinking
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Need Poet Public Young Yourself
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

Absolute Admire Greatness Lyrics Poetry
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caste Loyalty Operation Religion System
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Command Move Success
One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identity Oneself

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

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Popular Authors

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