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

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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.
Seamus Heaney
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
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On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
Seamus Heaney
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Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney
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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney