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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.

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
Guests
Would
Thought
Visit
Stockholm
Littles
Foundation
Welcomed
Ever
City
Swedish
Little
Cities
Encountered
Firsts
Guest
First
Name
Nobel
Mind
Names
Academy
Never
Ends

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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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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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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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 drink to keep body and soul apart.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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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.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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