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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
Entirely
Created
Conditions
Wonderful
Almost
Home
Done
Writing
Harvard

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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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 suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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 suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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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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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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