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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Rewards
Joy
Moment
Moments
Associated
Writing
Lift
Always
Reward
Lifts
Unexpected

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I shall gain glory or die.
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Write whatever you like!
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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