Part 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 HeaneyThe gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
Seamus HeaneyIn off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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 Heaney