I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Write whatever you like!
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY