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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

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
Suppose
Pressure
Public
Certain
Feel
Feels
Always

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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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.
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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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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.
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The next move is always the test.
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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 end of art is peace.
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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.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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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.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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