Top 187 Quotes & Sayings by Seamus Heaney
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Write whatever you like!
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
I spend almost every morning with mail.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
The end of art is peace.
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
My passport's green.
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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.
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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.
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
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