In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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The end of art is peace.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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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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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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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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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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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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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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