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 HEANEYPoems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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When 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.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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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.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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