Seamus Heaney Quotes
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.
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The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.
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A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.
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Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.
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Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
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One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 the year of the Easter Rising. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.
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There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.