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 HEANEYWhen I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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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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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY