Seamus Heaney Quotes

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that ‘A poem should be equal to / not true’. As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.

The gods do grant immunity, you see, To everybody except the true and the just.

I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves the thing along.

words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

"Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?"

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

The space we stood around had been emptied into us to keep

"Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

"Postscript

My flesh was not for feasting on

Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.