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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
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Groups
Position
Disapproving
Public
Variously
Political
Mutually
Expectation
Positions
Expectations
Poetry

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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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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.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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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.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney