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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
Air
Walk
Walks
Wisdom
Better
Judgement

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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've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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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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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Write whatever you like!
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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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.
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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 next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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