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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

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
Change
Revenge
Wells
Forgiveness
Great
Healing
Believe
Miracle
Sea
Reachable
Side
Miracles
Sides
Shore
Hope
Cures

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Best 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.
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Write whatever you like!
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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 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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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The 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.
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