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
expectations political groups
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
ignorance people different
Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
poetry
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
almost chiefly entering exchange ghostly people
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.
art delight eternal gives kinds pope resonance small sort timeless truth
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.
age certain death inhabited obsessed personally shades
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
case dylan history poetry thomas
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
life reverence utter
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
feminine
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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.
anybody hard knows poetry worthwhile
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
poetry
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
poetry promote
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.