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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.

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
Stepping
Poems
Stones
Oneself
Sense
Thought
Always

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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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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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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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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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