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In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.

— Seamus Heaney

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Poetry

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

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

History says don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Seamus Heaney (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.