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My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
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Ireland
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Hidden
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Scotland
Anyone
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More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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I 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.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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.
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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