Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them.… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties.… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving… — 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
![“The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.” quote by Seamus Heaney](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/70f/seamus-heaney-1711_alphabet_the-poems-i-did-write-there-in-harvard-i_2667103.jpg)
