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.
Seamus HeaneyThe Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus HeaneyEven though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.
Seamus HeaneyWhen I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Seamus HeaneyI've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus HeaneyAnything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.
Seamus HeaneyI felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.
Seamus HeaneyI have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus HeaneyAnyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus HeaneyBut that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Seamus HeaneyBest to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
Seamus HeaneyI have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus HeaneyWhether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
Seamus HeaneyIn off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus HeaneyIf self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
Seamus HeaneyThe most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.
Seamus HeaneyHope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Seamus HeaneyOne of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.
Seamus HeaneyIn fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus HeaneyNot to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.
Seamus HeaneyA public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus HeaneyPart of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.
Seamus HeaneyThere is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.
Seamus HeaneySo hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
Seamus HeaneyMemory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Seamus HeaneyIt is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus HeaneyOnce I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
Seamus HeaneyI 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.
Seamus HeaneyA writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
Seamus HeaneyThe appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.
Seamus HeaneyAllow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase "Be Here Now." If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
Seamus Heaney