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

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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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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.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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