99+ Seamus Heaney Quotes on Expression, Beowulf and Poetry - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Seamus Heaney quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Seamus Heaney quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Seamus Heaney wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Expression, Beowulf and Poetry

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job.

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 on the judging panel.

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

I’ve nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

Let whoever can win glory before death.

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

Desmond O’Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.

Fate goes ever as fate must.

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking.

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 world.

Over the waves, with the wind behind her and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird until her curved prow had covered the distance...

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.

Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport’s green.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.

A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can’t be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.

The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting hoarse.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

The dotted line my father’s ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won’t wash away.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

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