I 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 HeaneyAt home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus HeaneyThe completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Seamus Heaney