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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.

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
Thing
Expressed
Way
Readers
Make
Poem
Finished
Reader
Trust
Best
Find
Rightly

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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Write whatever you like!
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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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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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 suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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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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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney