Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEYI think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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The end of art is peace.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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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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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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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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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY