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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

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
Rhyme
Darkness
Poetry
Echoing

More quotes by 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.
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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 dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
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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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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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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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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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 Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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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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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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