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
break poetry
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
aloud carry deeper farther helps poem presence time voice
Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
associated full life reflects
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
electric heart impatient picture proper sets shock surprise television
We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm.
alive attentive behind grown history news
I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it.
ignorance people different
Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
memories way facts
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
art ifs inner-life
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
class want caste-system
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
smile miles rhythm
Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
god views order
God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
forgiveness sea forgiving
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
queens lunch once-upon-a-time
I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
desolation operations left-behind
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.