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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

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
Often
Crises
Comes
Solitary
Also
Isolated
Self
Intimate
Crisis
Completely
Poetry
Gets

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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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