Seamus Heaney Quotes

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.

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.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to 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 experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

And a young prince must be prudent like that, giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

Since when, " he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poemWhere the poem begins and ends?

More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Pangur BánPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney

I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Fate goes ever as fate must.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

I spend almost every morning with mail.

words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

All I know is a door into the dark

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

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.