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 HEANEYIn Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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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.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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.
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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY