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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

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
Line
Lines
Father
Dotted
Away
Strand
Else
Strands
Made
Tide
Something
Wash
Tides

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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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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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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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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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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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The end of art is peace.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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.
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