Seamus Heaney
History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'Collection: History
The end of art is peace.Collection: Art
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.Collection: Poetry
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.Collection: Attitude
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.Collection: Imagination
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.Collection: Poetry
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Trust
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.Collection: Poetry
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.Collection: Poetry
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.Collection: Hope
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Poetry
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Poetry
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.Collection: Poetry
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.Collection: Poetry
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.Collection: Marriage
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.Collection: Poetry
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.Collection: Life
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.Collection: Hope
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.Collection: Learning
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.Collection: Education
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.Collection: Poetry
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.Collection: 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.
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.
If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.
I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.