“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I’ve nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.”
― Seamus Heaney
“If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”
― Seamus Heaney
“In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”
― Seamus Heaney
“My passport’s green.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.”
― Seamus Heaney
“My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The day I entered St Columb’s College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.”
― Seamus Heaney
“In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.”
― Seamus Heaney
“In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Write whatever you like!”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.”
― Seamus Heaney
“It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.”
― Seamus Heaney
“My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.”
― Seamus Heaney
“In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Sonnet is about movement in a form.”
― Seamus Heaney
“What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’”
― Seamus Heaney
“In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.”
― Seamus Heaney
“One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.”
― Seamus Heaney
“You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“To encounter ‘Beowulf’ is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.”
― Seamus Heaney
“As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I’ve been in the habit of helping people.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.”
― Seamus Heaney
“We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I spend almost every morning with mail.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.”
― Seamus Heaney
“It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them… They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.”
― Seamus Heaney
“You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.”
― Seamus Heaney
“There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The problem as you get older… is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.”
― Seamus Heaney
“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.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.”
― Seamus Heaney
“I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.”
― Seamus Heaney
“My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.”
― Seamus Heaney
“The end of art is peace.”
― Seamus Heaney
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