Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney, MRIAwas an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 April 1939
CityCastledawson, Northern Ireland
CountryIreland
Seamus Heaney quotes about
desolation operations left-behind
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
poetry
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
somebody whitman yeats
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
since
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.
poetry
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
poems
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
equals experience last lecture prose stuff
My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
poetry
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
archaic associate belonged creature entirely family gaelic home houses rural side
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.
benign nobel struck
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.
acquired adult behalf came counted early family farm funerals hay wakes work
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.
admit afterlife god language personal religious sort yearning
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.
aware bought entered parting special
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.
formed grown michael necessary paul writers
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.