Quotes About Seamus Heaney

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

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

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.

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

Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.

I was living in Britain and then America, but it wasn't until I returned to live in Ireland in the late '70s that I really became aware of Seamus Heaney. I discovered quickly that his poems are very accessible.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

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.

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.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

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

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.

Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again.

A landscape fossilized, It's stone-wall patternings Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo. Before I turned to go He talked about persistence, A congruence of lives, How, stubbed and cleared of stones, His home accrued growth rings Of iron, flint and bronze - "Belderg

There was no one else like him alive. In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth, high-born and powerful. He ordered a boat that would ply the waves. He announced his plan: to sail the swan's road and search out that king, the famous prince who needed defenders.

Beowulf is my name."" June 4, 2022 – 52.0% ""hand-to-hand is how it will be, a life-and-death fight with the fiend. Whichever one death fells must deem it a just judgement by God.

They said that of all the kings upon the earth he was the man most gracious and fair-minded, kindest to his people

Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield, a cub in the yard, a comfort sent by God...

Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.