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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.

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
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Poet
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Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Changed
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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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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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.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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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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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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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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