If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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 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 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 Heaney