The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
— Seamus Heaney
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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 gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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.
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.
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.
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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.
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
My passport's green.
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
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.
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Write whatever you like!
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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.
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.
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
