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
dear imagination people
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
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.
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.
people behaviour path
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
people affliction might
I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
thinking people understanding
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
hardy suppose thomas
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
conferred fact musically order poet quite repose satisfying seeking speaker stability strain towards uttered
But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds.
censure considers flourish itself qualified rhetoric vigilance
No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration.
art born brought devoted earnest experience ireland lived northern past quarter though towards
This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century.
advised glass ours raised surprised toast
Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast The Queen.
beings both conduct envisage exposure human inner moment reminder scary
It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives.
time
The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way.
best binge given tom type
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.