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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.

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
Giving
Nowadays
Peers
Guild
Awards
Guilds
Judging
Assent
Poetry
Panel
Gives
Sustenance
Coming
Award
Sense
Solidarity

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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium 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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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 rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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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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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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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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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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