Seamus Heaney Quotes

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

I like poems that are little games.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

I like poems that are complex.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.