I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEYYour temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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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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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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY