Category: Seamus Heaney

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

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.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

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

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.