Heaney, a short afterword: “wasn’t it the job of the poet to roar in indignation?”

…surely every dweller in the country must hope that the governments involved in its governance can devise institutions which will allow that partition to become a bit more like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing for agile give-and-take, for encounter and contending, prefiguring a future where the vitality that flowed in the beginning from those bracing words “enemy” and “allies” might finally derive from a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary. Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Speech, 1995 …

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