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AudioFiles: Seamus Heaney Reads His Poems
(audio files from The Internet Poetry Archive: Seamus Heaneyl Seamus Heaney Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature Seamus Heaney - The Academy of American Poets Featured Author: Seamus Heaney: New York Times Archives Nobel Lecture, by Seamus Heaney All Ireland's Bard by Seamus Heaney: Atlantic Monthly Article on Yeats Beowulf - A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney at Goucher College
Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney will read from his work at Goucher College on October 24, 2002. For details and to reserve free tickets, call the Goucher College Box Office at 410 337 6333.
Born in 1939 on a farm 30 miles Northwest of Belfast, Seamus Heaney first
began to publish poetry in the literary magazines of St Joseph's College, where
he became a lecturer in 1963, under the pseudonym "Incertus."
"To
begin with," he said in his Nobel Lecture of 1995, "I wanted that
truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem
seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or
stood up for or stood its ground against. I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of the
covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley
Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also equations for a
rapture and an ache I didn't fully know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert
Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness; and Chaucer too
for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a different kind of accuracy, a
moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and always will, in the war
poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and
absorbs the shock of the new century's barbarism. Then later again, in the pure
consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert
Lowell's and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered
further reasons for believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility - to say
what happens, to "pity the planet," to be 'not concerned with
Poetry.'"
After his marriage to Marie Devlin in 1965 he moved from Northern Ireland
to the Irish Republic, but remained engaged in the troubles of Northern Ireland,
as he says a little later in the same Nobel Lecture, "bowed to the desk
like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his
understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world,
knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained
by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture." In this posture he has created some of the memorable and
lasting poetry of the late twentieth century, from his first book, Death of A
Naturalist to his most recent, Electric Light.
His verse translation of Beowulf, published in the year 2000,
restored that medieval poem to popularity among contemporary readers.
Heaney's many awards and accolades include the Somerset Maugham Award,
the E.M. Forster Award, and the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. The American poet Robert Lowell recognized Seamus Heaney as
"the most important Irish poet since Yeats."
Among a people renowned for its great gifts in language and literature,
Heaney remains and outstanding practitioner of (as he terms in his Nobel
Lecture) "an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are."
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Books by Seamus Heaney
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