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Walk on air against your better judgement.

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
Judgement
Air
Walk
Walks
Wisdom
Better

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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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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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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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.
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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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