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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.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
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Playwright
Poet
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Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Expectation
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Expectations
Poetry
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Disapproving
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Variously
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Political
Mutually
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
Walk on air against your better judgement.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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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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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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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 nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus Heaney
