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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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"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

"From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be."

"In the grueling light that passed for day..."

"Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence."

"The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee."
Explore more quotes by Seamus Heaney


"As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note."


"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."


"Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses."


"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."


"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."


"In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself."
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