We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEYEvery time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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The end of art is peace.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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