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
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
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
“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
“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
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
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
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
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
“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
“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
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
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
“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
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. — 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
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 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
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. — 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
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. — 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
