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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

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
Notes
Writers
Wary
Citizens
Sinners
Reader
Realism
Positive
Note
Sense
Sinner
Reality
Aesthetic
Make
Readers

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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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