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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.

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
Much
Released
Stanza
Rhyme
Fission
Concerns
Buoyancy
Poem
Linguistic
Tone
Cadence
Concern
Truthfulness
Poet
Fusion
Energy
Generated

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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.
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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.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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The end of art is peace.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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Poetry is language in orbit.
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The next move is always the test.
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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 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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney