I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — 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
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
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — 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
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
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
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
“Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” — 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
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. — 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
“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
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
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
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
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
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. — 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
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. — 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
