Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEYIt’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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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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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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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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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY