Seamus Heaney Quotes - Page 4

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

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

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.

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.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

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

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

I shall gain glory or die.

My body was braille for the creeping influences.