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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
Defiance
Suppose
Saying
Actually
Jobs
Part
Lyric

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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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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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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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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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 dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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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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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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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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