Quotes by Seamus Heaney

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. Its a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, its now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

Tom Sleighs poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

“Let whoever can win glory before death.”

“I suppose Im saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”

“All I know is a door into the dark”

“I cant think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change peoples understanding of whats going on in the world.”

“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. ”

“I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.”

“If you have the words, theres always a chance that youll find the way.”