I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEYManifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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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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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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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.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY