In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
SEAMUS HEANEYI have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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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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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY