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
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.
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.
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.
north
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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.
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.
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.