Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus HeaneyRead
I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
Interpretation
Seamus Heaney expresses how the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins had a profound impact on him, transforming his perception of language and poetry.
In this quote, Seamus Heaney reflects on the transformative power of Hopkins' poetry, describing it as 'electric' and noting how it altered the conventions of language. Heaney emphasizes the intensity and innovative use of speech in Hopkins' work, which inspired him and deepened his appreciation for poetry.
In practice
This quote could be used in a lecture on the influence of poets on each other.
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!
And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn't have done it, and what forced me to do all this weird stuff on the guitar was I couldn't afford effects pedals, I didn't have all this stuff when I was a kid so I just tried to squeeze all the weird noises I could out of the guitar, which brings me to building guitars.
The song becomes the meaning itself through the vibratory qualities. When we begin to catch the vibratory qualities...the song begins to sing us...I don't know anymore if I am finding that song or if I am that song.
In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance.
My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.
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