I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEYEven if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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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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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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