I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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 spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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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.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY