In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEYWe go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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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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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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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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY