My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEYI suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEYOne 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.
SEAMUS HEANEYYou yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEYI spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEYOne doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEYI think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEYI believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEYHistory says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEYEven if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
SEAMUS HEANEY