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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

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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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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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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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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 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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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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I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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The next move is always the test.
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