Irish - Poet | April 13, 1939 - August 30, 2013
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
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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One doesn't want one's identity coerced.
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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