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“... to my mind.He said: I made the Iliad from suchA local row. Gods make their own importance.Seamus Heaney might agree. Here is the first paragraph in this, his first collection of prose pieces:I would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat ...”

“... long been a cockpit of ideological contentions over national origins, pedigrees and continuities. Seamus Heaney, for example, refers casually to Beowulf as being ‘in English’, as though there were some unbroken thread from the speech of Hrothgar to the idiom of William Hague. Oxford’s dilemma was that you needed a philologically based English ...”

“... out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall. The riot of hair came later, in the 1970s, the period after the epochal move out of ...”

“... Verse (1986), that a ‘Northern Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival ...”

“... in memory of Seamus Heaney I I blew a kiss across the stage to you When we read our poems in Lisdoonvarna Two weeks before you died. Arrayed in straw The Armagh Rhymers turned up at the end. II In the middle of a field in Mourne country Standing side by side, looking straight ahead We peed against a fragment of stone wall, St Patrick’s windbreak, the rain’s urinal ...”

“... Towards​ the end of 1997, Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend Derek Mahon from Magdalen College, Oxford. ‘Amigo, Here briefly, at the fall of the leaf,’ he began, archly but affably. ‘The deer-park misty, the choir angelic, the heart aswim.’ Mahon had just published The Yellow Book, a collection of long-lined, sophisticated poems steeped in Baudelaire and the fin de siècle ...”

“... hotel has a whole half-page picture of a poet I know well. The headline’s ‘Seimous xini, Seamus!’ No need to read the efuge or pethane that follow to know Seamus Heaney had died. Some years back we’d dined in the hotel that’s now derelict just behind. His eyes from the picture stare into the ruin. It was ...”

“... was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ‘The Baboon in the Night ...”

“... When​ the posthumous Collected Poems of W.H. Auden appeared in 1976, Seamus Heaney wrote an appreciative review for the magazine Hibernia in which he tolda story about a Ballymena listener calling the BBC one morning in 1969, after the Northern Ireland news had given a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening ...”

“... association of largeness of scale with magnitude of achievement (in spite of the example set by Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska, both represented in Short and Sweet, whose Nobel Prize-sized reputations were earned through lyric-length writings). Since the launch of his trail-blazing first collection, Zoom!, in 1989, when he was 26, Armitage has ...”

“... In​ one of those engagingly innocent-seeming anecdotes Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height ...”

“... to Cresseid after she abandons Troilus. It begins with the author in a ‘doolie sessoun’ (Seamus Heaney translates this as ‘a gloomy time’, but Henryson just means the chilly start of spring). He starts to read Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, but then picks up ‘ane uther quair’ (‘a different volume’, as ...”

“... prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts all her chosen subjects ...”

“... make it so, and no doubt they would not want to try. The Irish poets, even the potent figure of Seamus Heaney, are not outside these general tendencies, though no doubt some of the charisma of Ulster poets comes from the fact that distinction there is grimly real and community not a figure of speech. Such straightforwardness affords relief to a ...”

“... as much as nature itself are the sources of his metamorphosising imagination. Unlike Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney, he has never felt the need to make his diction coincide with the rugged or violent nature he depicts. In a previously uncollected poem, ‘A Kind of People’, he writes: Umbrellas and parasols, Like old navy raincoats, Sewing ...”