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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
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Better
Describe
Hunch
Find
British
Hunches
Havens
Irish
Haven
Clue
Reader
React
American
Odd
Words
Differently
Cannot
Readers

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I shall gain glory or die.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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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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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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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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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.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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The next move is always the test.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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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.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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