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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

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
Started
Fact
Remembering
Facts
Poems
Remember
Fundamental
Way
Fundamentals
Always
Forgotten
Memory
Memories

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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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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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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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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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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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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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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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