“Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Is there life before death? That’s chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start-- poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Human beings suffer, They torture one another, They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Postscript And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October,… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour, ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince. They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new,… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Since when," he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends?” — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
“It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
![“Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start-- poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless; whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.” quote by Seamus Heaney](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/82b/seamus-heaney-1711_art_happy-the-man-with-a-natural-gift-for-pr_2644757.png)
![“Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.” quote by Seamus Heaney](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/2e6/seamus-heaney-1711_anything-can-happen_anything-can-happen-is-also-incidentally_181651.png)
![“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…” quote by Seamus Heaney](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/5fb/seamus-heaney-1711_being-responsible_one-of-the-very-first-poems-i-wrote-was_181491.jpg)
