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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
Poems
Stones
Oneself
Sense
Thought
Always
Stepping

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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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 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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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Write whatever you like!
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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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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