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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

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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University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Rings
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More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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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 gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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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 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.
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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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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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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 I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
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Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
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I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney