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
art delight eternal gives kinds pope resonance small sort timeless truth
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.
almost chiefly entering exchange ghostly people
If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.
beauty injustice poetry situation violence war
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
poetry
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.
although amount bottom grow material reach sensory stored systems touch unless
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.
anyone bred northern
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.
allowed education ireland northern schools secondary students won
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
art domestic home itself poetry
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
generally
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
attempt bothering expression quite solid work writers
It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
carries expected experiment far poem poetry reasonably
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.
poetry refusal
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.
faking
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.