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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

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
Done
Writing
Harvard
Entirely
Created
Conditions
Wonderful
Almost
Home

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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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.
Seamus Heaney
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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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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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 always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney