I”ve been writing elsewhere about the importance and validity of poetry, about the differences that poetry can make in this world. That”s why this quote nearly stopped me in my tracks:

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. I credit it immediately because of a line I wrote fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be listening) to “walk on air against your better judgement”. But I credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet”s being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind”s centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at the word “Stockholm” on the face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.

- Seamus Heaney, Address to the Nobel Committee

The words were written and spoken in 1995 when poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature. You can find the full text of his address here. The quote is taken out of context – the space-walk to which Heaney refers is his own walking on air at the honor of being named a Nobel Laureate – but it”s no less true for all of that. In taking up his own theme of the poetic being “not true but equal” – that being a quote from Archibald MacLeish, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner himself. Heaney”s address speaks to the inspiration that poetry is – how it touches on the earnest humanity in all of us, and in doing so, brings us all toward a center of being that is, in the last word, human. Take the time to read Heaney”s address – it is a wonderful paean of praise to poetry, and well worth the reading.

[tags]poetry, Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize[/tags]