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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.

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
Find
British
Hunches
Havens
Irish
Haven
Clue
Reader
React
American
Odd
Words
Differently
Cannot
Readers
Better
Describe
Hunch

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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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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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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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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Poetry is language in orbit.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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.
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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 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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I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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