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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.

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
Years
Closer
Sofa
Would
Ears
Sofas
Became
Speaker
Listening
Speakers
Arms
Deliberate
Went
Climb
Bigs
Climbs
Hands
Concentration
Wireless

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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium 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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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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Write whatever you like!
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I shall gain glory or die.
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