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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
Went
Climb
Bigs
Climbs
Hands
Concentration
Wireless
Years
Closer
Sofa
Would
Ears
Sofas
Became
Speaker
Listening
Speakers
Arms
Deliberate
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
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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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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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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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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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 rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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