It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY