Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. -Seamus Heaney Attitude
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. -Seamus Heaney Marriage
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
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. -Seamus Heaney Peace
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
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. -Seamus Heaney Truth
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. -Seamus Heaney Poetry
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. -Seamus Heaney Truth
