Quote

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.

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
Times
Enters
Need
Variation
Surprising
Right
Poem
Needs
Deeper
World
Played
Wise
Upon
Tuning

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Write whatever you like!
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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Poetry is language in orbit.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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The next move is always the test.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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