Seamus Heaney quotes

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

The end of art is peace.

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.

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

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

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.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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

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

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

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

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

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.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The end of art is peace.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

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

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

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

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

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

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

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

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

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

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

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

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

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.