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All I know is a door into the dark.
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY, This Week magazine, Apr. 15, 2004
- Smile
- As you find a rhythm
- Working you, slow mile by mile,
- Into your proper haunt.
Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope.... That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
SEAMUS HEANEY, Paris Review, Fall 1997
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
SEAMUS HEANEY, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1995
- God is a foreman with certain definite views
- Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
- Those were the days--
- booting a leather football
- truer and farther
- than you ever expected!
SEAMUS HEANEY, Three Drawings
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY, The Redress of Poetry
- Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
- Our echoes die in that corridor and now
- I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
- Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons.
SEAMUS HEANEY, The Underground
Walk on air against your better judgement.
SEAMUS HEANEY, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1995
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