Poetry Quotes by Seamus Heaney
All Poetry quotes Seamus Heaney’s page
A squat pen rests between finger and thumb like a tiny gun, a picture Heaney uses to describe writing. His quotes talk about how poems can shift how we see the world and how they grow from classroom lessons. He also notes that poetry feels mysterious and that he prefers his own style over avant‑garde experiments.
![“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/i/2e6/seamus-heaney-1711_anything-can-happen_anything-can-happen-is-also-incidentally_181651.png)
![“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/i/82b/seamus-heaney-1711_art_happy-the-man-with-a-natural-gift-for-pr_2644757.png)
![“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/i/5fb/seamus-heaney-1711_being-responsible_one-of-the-very-first-poems-i-wrote-was_181491.jpg)
