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Danh ngôn của Seamus Heaney (Sứ mệnh: 1)

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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.
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.
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.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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.
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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.
I spend almost every morning with mail.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
The end of art is peace.