I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEYEven if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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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.
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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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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The end of art is peace.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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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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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 experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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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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