In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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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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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.
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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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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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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 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