Using QuotesNot usin' it right, Joe.

Introduce QuotesBurris claims that Heaney’s poetry falls into the pastoral tradition; he argues, “Heaney’s vision ironically reverses the role of traditional pastoral nostalgia because his conjured past, though it leads ultimately to toleration and understanding as all Golden Ages must, participated in sacrificial killing” (73).

Format and Cite

•Use quotation marks!

•Use parenthetical citation!

Explain your quote“The Grauballe Man” describes the victim of ritual sacrifice like a baby, observing “his rusted hair, / a mat unlikely / as a foetus’s” (29-31) and “a head and shoulder out of the peat, / bruised like a forceps baby” (34-36). Rather than instilling hope, this birth imagery indicates the destructive nature of the myth; the bog gives birth to a dead man.

More tips

•Don’t use a quote just because it sounds impressive.

“As philology turns into mythology, Heaney's etymological broodings blur into a contemplation of primitive origins” (Inglebien 649).

• If you can’t explain it, don’t use it.

Change the Quote

•To clarify something

The Denmark Heaney encounters in Glob’s book is poetically transmuted into a representation of Ireland, both past and present, in “a search for images and symbols adequate to [Northern Ireland’s] predicament” (“Feeling”56).

•To fit your sentence grammatically

The speaker knows that he would have been complicit with the bog woman’s punishment by his silence because he has “stood dumb” (37) at the modern incident, at which he both feels “civilized outrage” (42) and “yet [understands] the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge” (43-44).

•To exclude unimportant information or words

Lysaght observes, “There is a restraint upon the language and the voice of these poems because they express, in English, the fact of the loss of Gaelic, among other things. In these [poems], [. . .] Heaney grounds his literary vocabulary in the Irish landscape” (444).

Left out: “and in several other poems in the same collection”

Citation

•If you name the author in your sentence, you don’t have to include it in the parenthetical citation. You just need the page number.

•If you do not include the author’s name in your sentence, it should go in the parenthetical citation.