Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney, MRIAwas an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 April 1939
CityCastledawson, Northern Ireland
CountryIreland
habit helping
I've been in the habit of helping people.
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
inevitably suppose
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
believe improve
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
poetry
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
irish-poet last poetry stored
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
actual art deepest irish moment movement
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
arranging time
The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
formed grown michael necessary paul writers
The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
aware bought entered parting special
The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.
admit afterlife god language personal religious sort yearning
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
inner life supply
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.
acquired adult behalf came counted early family farm funerals hay wakes work
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
benign nobel struck
I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.