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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
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University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Always
Forgotten
Memory
Memories
Started
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Remembering
Facts
Poems
Remember
Fundamental
Way
Fundamentals

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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Write whatever you like!
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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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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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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