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" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "
Seamus Heaney
About
Form
Sonnet
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" Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. "
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Almost
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" Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. "
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Site
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Quickly
" I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. "
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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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" My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland. "
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Side
Home
Been
" I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. "
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Disappointment
Preparation
Childhood
" It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress. "
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True
Work
Done
" Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted. "
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Old
Recognized
Road
" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "
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Sean
Soul
Brown
" In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example. "
Seamus Heaney
Farm
Family
Early
" 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
Perception
Change
Trust
" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "
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Center
Think
Original
" To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. "
Seamus Heaney
Like
Face
You
" As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. "
Seamus Heaney
Young
Need
Poet
" 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
Thought
City
End
" The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. "
Seamus Heaney
Culture
Brain
Body
" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "
Seamus Heaney
Want
Identity
" In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. "
Seamus Heaney
War
Poetry
Violence
" My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. "
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Reality
Language
Kind
" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "
Seamus Heaney
Me
People
Alive
" I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy. "
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Community
Myself
Moment
" You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. "
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Feel
Yourself
Your
" I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. "
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Fear
Always
Writing
" I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. "
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Expression
You
Suppose
" I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. "
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Ground
Ireland
Like
" The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. "
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Irish
Helped
Ireland
" The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. "
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Poet
World
Side
" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "
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Anything
Your
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Threshold
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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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Where
Crisis
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