Seamus Heaney Interview

_The Guardian_ has a long interview with Seamus Heaney today.� It’s an excerpt from a book of interviews with the Irish Nobel Prize winning Poet written by fellow Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll.� Heany’s translation of _Beowulf_ is a bestseller, quite a feat for an old poem.

http://tinyurl.com/6pa25j

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Added by Sherry: Here’s a consoling statement from Heaney, asked whether his “innate scepticism intensify doubts about presuming to pursue a life in poetry”

You could say that every poem I write – or that anybody else writes, for that matter – is a way of overcoming those doubts. Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. I used to think that, if you came from a background like mine, your approach to the muse was shyer than if you came from a more bookish or artistic family, but now I’m not so sure. Yeats had an artist daddy, Eliot had a poetry-writing mammy, and that was a great help to them. But what about Elizabeth Bishop or Plath? Or Kavanagh? Or Pessoa? You could argue that scepticism about literature is what actually inspired Pessoa.

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