Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
SEAMUS HEANEYIt’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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.
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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.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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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.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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The 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.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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The end of art is peace.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY