If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEYI came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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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.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY