Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Seamus HeaneyAnything 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.
Seamus HeaneyIn fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney