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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
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Playwright
Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
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React
American
Odd
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Differently
Cannot
Readers
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Describe
Hunch
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British
Hunches
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Irish
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More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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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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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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 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 end of art is peace.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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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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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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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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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.
Seamus Heaney