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
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.
inner life supply
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.
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.
arranging time
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.
actual art deepest irish moment movement
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.
irish-poet last poetry stored
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
poetry
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
inevitably suppose
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
habit helping
I've been in the habit of helping people.
graduate poems poetry quite students united
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
everybody famous half ireland maybe
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
north
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.