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
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.
feminine
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
life reverence utter
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
case dylan history poetry thomas
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
intelligence naturally
I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
code given god granted seemed took
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.
age certain death inhabited obsessed personally shades
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
fear
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
sean
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
dear imagination people
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
northern
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.