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
north
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
northern
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
anyone bred northern
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.
allowed education ireland northern schools secondary students won
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.
art born brought devoted earnest experience ireland lived northern past quarter though towards
This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century.
hardy suppose thomas
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
best binge given tom type
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.
changed electric hopkins intensity liked
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.
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.
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.
habit helping
I've been in the habit of helping people.
inevitably suppose
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
poetry
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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.