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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

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
Greedily
Moors
Beams
Beam
Cursed
Mist
Came

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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.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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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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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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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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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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I shall gain glory or die.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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