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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.

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
Made
Tense
Anticipation
Safe
Started
Jobs
Felt
Enough

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Write whatever you like!
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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.
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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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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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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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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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