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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.
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
System
Class
Unionism
Call
Protestantism
Whatever
Caste
Castes
Operates
Northern
Ireland
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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.
Seamus Heaney
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
Seamus Heaney
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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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.
Seamus Heaney
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 might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
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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 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 suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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