Tag Archives: Seamus Heaney

“A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes, and finds that it is his life.” — Patrick Kavanagh

Posted on October 21, 2024 by sheila

Patrick Kavanagh, titanically angry Irish poet, was born on this day in 1904. He came of age during the Celtic Renaissance and he thought it was all a bunch of bullshit. That is not a direct quote. He was much … Continue reading →

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“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” — Oscar Wilde

Posted on October 16, 2024 by sheila

It’s his birthday today. One of my heroes. His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka “Speranza”) was an incredible woman – also in the canon of Irish literary history certainly, not to mention its politics and social … Continue reading →

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“I like myself poems that are gentle rather than arrogant intellectually. Where language fades into cries or whispers.” — Medbh McGuckian

Posted on August 12, 2024 by sheila

“Hate those two words together, they are so unwomanly and unpoetic together they cancel each other out. ‘Poet’ I don’t like or ‘woman’ or ‘man’ none of these words although I have had to use them. ‘Female’ not much better. … Continue reading →

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“I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.” — Paul Muldoon

Posted on June 20, 2024 by sheila

“I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already know.” – Paul Muldoon It’s his birthday today. Like Seamus Heaney … Continue reading →

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“That is no country for old men.” — William Butler Yeats

Posted on June 13, 2024 by sheila

“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats William Butler … Continue reading →

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“Literature is the written expression of revolt against expected things.” Happy Birthday to the least happy man ever, Thomas Hardy

Posted on June 2, 2024 by sheila

“A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.” — Thomas Hardy That quote above from … Continue reading →

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“[My function] in Scotland during the past twenty to thirty years [is] that of the cat-fish that vitalizes the other torpid denizens of the aquarium.” –Hugh MacDiarmid

Posted on August 11, 2020 by sheila

The function, as it seems to me, O’ Poetry is to bring to be At lang, lang last that unity … — Hugh MacDiarmid, “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” It’s his birthday today. He was born on August … Continue reading →

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“But there is all this ambiguity. That is poetry. It is the other thing that is the other thing.” — Irish poet Derek Mahon

Posted on November 23, 2019 by sheila

“[Seamus] Heaney is a Wordsworth man and I’m a Coleridge man. I love the poetry, and the trajectory of his life has always fascinated me. His Biographia is a complete mess, but is still full of the most wonderful stuff.” … Continue reading →

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2015 Books Read

Posted on December 31, 2015 by sheila

Even I am impressed with how much I read this year. Along the course of the year, occasionally I’d think to myself, “Good job, Sheila, with your Self-Imposed Reading Plan!” I’ve read a lot of new novels (not really my … Continue reading →

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The Books: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001: ‘Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain,’ by Seamus Heaney

Posted on April 3, 2015 by sheila

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!) NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. The following … Continue reading →

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