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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.

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
Fact
Arrival
Facts
Elevation
Matter
Arrivals
Thing
Vocation
Life
Miraculous
Unexpected
Poetry
Almost

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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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I shall gain glory or die.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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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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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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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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 rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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