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

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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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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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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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