Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — 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
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
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. — 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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
“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
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. — 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 Image
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 Image
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive — 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 the sturdiest… — 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 the poem… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
![“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/quotes/img-quotes/5fb/seamus-heaney-1711_being-responsible_one-of-the-very-first-poems-i-wrote-was_181491.jpg)
![“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/quotes/img-quotes/2e6/seamus-heaney-1711_anything-can-happen_anything-can-happen-is-also-incidentally_181651.jpg)
![“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/quotes/img-quotes/82b/seamus-heaney-1711_art_happy-the-man-with-a-natural-gift-for-pr_2644757.jpg)
