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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
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Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
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More quotes by Seamus Heaney
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Seamus Heaney
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
Seamus Heaney