Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.
If self is a location, so is love.
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.
I felt implicated in American affairs. Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.
Poetry is language in orbit.
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.
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
Two buckets were easier carried than one. I grew up in between.
I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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.
I shall gain glory or die.
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.
Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boatbook turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.
The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.
Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase "Be Here Now. " If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.