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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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
Queen
Queens
Lunch
Personally
Upon
Nothing
Time
Palace
Palaces

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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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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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 suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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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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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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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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