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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
Positions
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Disapproving
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Expectation
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
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 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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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
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.
Seamus Heaney
I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
Seamus Heaney
I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Seamus Heaney
So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
Seamus Heaney
I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
Seamus Heaney
The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
