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
hardy suppose thomas
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
censure considers flourish itself qualified rhetoric vigilance
No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration.
faking
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
generally
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
mysterious wonder poetry-is
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
strange huge
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
wetness might centre
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.
lyric-poetry facts truthfulness
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
scotland speech speak
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.
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.
somebody whitman yeats
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
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.
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.