Seamus Heaney Poetry Quotations

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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.

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.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

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.

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

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Poetry is language in orbit.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.