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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.

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
Effort
Community
Plies
Individual
Larger
Whole
Aim
Work
Finally
Service
Poet
Poetry

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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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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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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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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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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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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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