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Poetry Quotes by Seamus Heaney
- I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
- Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in…
- The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
- The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself -…
- Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
- A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
- In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
- The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of…
- I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
- Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
- Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
- The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
- In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
- In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
- In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
- In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
- If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
- We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
- Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
- Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers…
- Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
- Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
- Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden