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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
Havens
Irish
Haven
Clue
Reader
React
American
Odd
Words
Differently
Cannot
Readers
Better
Describe
Hunch
Find
British
Hunches

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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Write whatever you like!
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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Poetry is language in orbit.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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The next move is always the test.
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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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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 suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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