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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

Seamus Heaney

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Award Judgement Panel Poetry Solidarity Yourself
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complete Crisis Intimate Isolation Poetry
I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Risk Truth World Yourself
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Group Poetry Position
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Associate Creature Family Father Traditional World
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Help Imagination Myself
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fundamental Memories Myself Poem Start
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Children Father Mom Myself
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Design Fear Finding Myself Place Superstition Writing
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Country Known Unity Yourself
One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identity Oneself
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Best Description Himself Myself Writing
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrangement Aware Old Problem Trick
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Form Movement One Liner
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY

One Liner Path Poetry

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

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Popular Authors

More Seamus Heaney Quotes