Quotes by Seamus Heaney

“The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.”

“Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.”

“I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”

“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”

“Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.”

“A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.”

“The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.”

“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”

“The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.”

“The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.”

“In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.”

“In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.”

“Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.”

“Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.”

“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”

“And a young prince must be prudent like that,giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.”

“At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.”

“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”

“It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,...”

“History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme”