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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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
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University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Ireland
Towards
Figure
Figures
Authority
Habit
Attitude
Ironical
Home
Avoidance
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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