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 HEANEYWe go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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Write whatever you like!
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY