I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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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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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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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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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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEY