I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Every 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.
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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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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 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.
SEAMUS HEANEY