I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” — 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
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. — 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
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
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 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
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
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 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
“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
“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
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. — 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
![“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/quotes/img-quotes/70f/seamus-heaney-1711_alphabet_the-poems-i-did-write-there-in-harvard-i_2667103.jpg)
![“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)
