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
“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
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
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
“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
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
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging — 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
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
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
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