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.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 HEANEY -
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY