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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

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
Strange
Huge
Fear
Nothing

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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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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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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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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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Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
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