Seamus Heaney Infosite
Seamus Heaney Quotes
• Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
• The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.
• The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
• 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.
• It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
• I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
• Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
• We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm.
• I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it.
• 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.
• Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
• This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century.
• In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
• To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.
• The next move is always the test.
• There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
• No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration.
• Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
• On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
• But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds.
• As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
• It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives.
• 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.
• The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way.
• Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Seamus Heaney Bibliography
Poetry1966 - Death of a Naturalist
1969 - Door into the Dark
1972 - Wintering Out
1975 - North
1979 - Field Work
1984 - Station Island
1987 - The Haw Lantern
1991 - Seeing Things
1996 - The Spirit Level Faber & Faber
2001 - Electric Light
2006 - District and Circle
1980 - Selected Poems 1965-1975
1990 - New Selected Poems 1966-1987
1998 - Opened Ground
Prose Collections
1980 - Preoccupations
1988 - The Government of the Tongue
1995 - The Redress of Poetry
2002 - Finders Keepers
Plays
1990 - The Cure at Troy A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes
2004 - The Burial at Thebes A version of Sophocles' Antigone
Translations
1983 - Sweeney Astray
1992 - Sweeney's Flight (with Rachel Giese
1993 - The Midnight Verdict
1995 - Laments
1999 - Beowulf
1999 - Diary of One Who Vanished
2002 - Hallaig
2002 - Arion
2004 - The Testament at Cresseid
2004 - Columcille The Scribe
Limited Editions and Booklets (Poetry & Prose)
1965 - Eleven Poems
1968 - The Island People
1968 - Room to Rhyme
1969 - A Lough Neagh Sequence
1970 - Night Drive
1970 - A Boy Driving His Father to Confession
1973 - Explorations
1975 - Stations
1975 - Bog Poems
1975 - The Fire i' the Flint
1976 - Four Poems
1977 - Glanmore Sonnets
1977 - In Their Element
1978 - Robert Lowell
1978 - The Makings of a Music
1978 - After Summer
1979 - Hedge School
1979 - Ugolino
1979 - Gravities
1979 - A Family Album
1980 - Toome
1981 - Sweeney Praises the Trees
1982 - A Personal Selection
1982 - Poems and a Memoir
1983 - An Open Letter
Seamus Heaney Centre
1983 - Among Schoolchildren
1984 - Verses for a Fordham Commencement
1984 - Hailstones
1985 - From the Republic of Conscience
1985 - Place and Displacement
1985 - Towards a Collaboration
1986 - Clearances
1988 - Readings in Contemporary Poetry
1988 - The Sounds of Rain
1989 - An Upstairs Outlook
1989 - The Place of Writing
1990 - The Tree Clock
1991 - Squarings
1992 - Dylan the Durable
1992 - The Gravel Walks
1992 - The Golden Bough
1993 - Keeping Going
1993 - Joy or Night
1994 - Extending the Alphabet
1994 - Speranza in Reading
1995 - Oscar Wilde Dedication
1995 - Charles Montgomery Monteith
1995 - Crediting Poetry
1997 - Poet to Blacksmith
1998 - Commencement Address
1998 - Audenesque
1999 - The Light of the Leaves
2001 - Something to Write Home About
2002 - Hope and History
2002 - Ecologues in Extremis
2002 - A Keen for the Coins
2003 - Squarings
2004 - Anything can Happen
2005 - The Door Stands Open
2005 - A Shiver
2006 - District and Circle
2007 - The Riverbank Field
2008 - Articulations
Useful Links:
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1995
Seamus Blowin Heaney
Seamus Heaney: Irish Poet, Writer & Nobel Laureate
About Seamus Heaney
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