Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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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.
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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
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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.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.
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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.
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It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.