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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

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
Lyric
Defiance
Suppose
Saying
Actually
Jobs
Part

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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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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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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 rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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