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

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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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've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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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 suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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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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