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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.

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
Would
Clout
Verbal
Strictly
Playwright
Knock
Shape
Shapes
Antigone
Take
Restructure

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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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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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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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The next move is always the test.
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