In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEYEternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY