What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEYA public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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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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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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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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.
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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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