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
archaic associate belonged creature entirely family gaelic home houses rural side
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.
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
poetry
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
equals experience last lecture prose stuff
My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
poems
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
poetry promote
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
poetry
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
came career farming
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
history hope side
History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'
anybody hard knows poetry worthwhile
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
since
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.
bang quarry
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
somebody whitman yeats
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.