Download or read book Seamus Heaney written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world's great poets. Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times. With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes. Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.
Download or read book 100 Poems written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected poems from a Nobel laureate In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, and will discover new favorites, from "The Cure at Troy" to "Death of a Naturalist." It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching far and wide, for now and for years to come. Seamus Heaney had the idea to make a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, a collection small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, but now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. No other selection of Heaney’s poems exists that has such a broad range, drawing from the first to the last of his prizewinning collections.
Download or read book Human Chain written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present—the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 101" plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.
Download or read book On Seamus Heaney written by Roy Foster and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and original account of one of Ireland’s greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney’s work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney’s evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney’s cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney’s life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.
Download or read book Field Work written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field Work he "brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world" (Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).
Download or read book Aeneid Book VI written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterpiece from one of the greatest poets of the century In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the significance of the poem to his writing, noting that "there's one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas's venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years--the golden bough, Charon's barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father." In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and sophisticated poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of James Wood, "created something imperishable and great that is stainless--stainless, because its force as poetry makes it untouchable by the claw of literalism: it lives singly, as an English language poem."
Download or read book District and Circle written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II – railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence" of "Cattle out in rain" – are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present – a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety. But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems which "do the rounds of the district" – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals. District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.
Download or read book Seeing Things written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeing Things (1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven." Along with translations from the Aeneid and the Inferno, this book offers several poems about Seamus Heaney's late father.
Download or read book Seamus Heaney in Context written by Geraldine Higgins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few poets have captured the imagination of the world like Seamus Heaney. Recognized as one of the truly outstanding poets of our time, Heaney's work is both critically acclaimed and popular with the general reader. It is taught in classrooms across the globe and has been translated into more than twenty-seven languages. Presenting original research from an international field of scholars, Seamus Heaney in Context offers new pathways to explore the places, times and influences that made Heaney a poet. Drawing on newly available archival and print sources, these essays situate Heaney in a multitude of contexts that help readers navigate received ideas about his life and work. In mapping intersecting themes in the current terrain of Heaney criticism, this study also signposts new directions for understanding Heaney's poetry in future contexts.
Download or read book North written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this collection, first published in 1975, Heaney located a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland--its people, history, and landscape--and which gave his poems direction, cohesion, and cumulative power. In North, the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.
Download or read book Door into the Dark written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Door into the Dark, Seamus Heaney's second collection of poems, first appeared in 1969. Already his widely celebrated gifts of precision, thoughtfulness, and musicality were everywhere apparent.
Download or read book Howdie Skelp written by Paul Muldoon and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. A “howdie-skelp” is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an “affront” to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.
Download or read book Stepping Stones written by Dennis O'Driscoll and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-12-09 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the life of twentieth-century Irish poet Seamus Heaney, from his infancy to his Nobel Prize in 1995, and also discusses his post-Nobel life, family, writings, and other related topics.
Download or read book Death of a Naturalist written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death of a Naturalist (1966) marked the auspicious debut of Seamus Heaney, a universally acclaimed master of modern literature. As a first book of poems, it is remarkable for its accurate perceptions and rich linguistic gifts.
Download or read book Crediting Poetry written by Seamus Heaney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture, captured here in Crediting Poetry, is a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive politics and "world-sorrow." Beginning with the "creaturely existence" of his childhood in a thatched farmstead in rural County Derry, Heaney traces his path in "the wideness of language." It is a way forged by listening: to the "burbles and squeaks" of BBC and Radio Eireann from a wireless speaker, to the triple-rhyme in a line of Yeats', but also to the sound of gunfire in Ulster and the keening desolation of all the "wounded spots on the face of the earth." Out of all these sounds Heaney discovers the necessity of poetic order--"an order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew." It is poetry's ability to convey the forces of the marvelous and the murderous together, Heaney writes, that gives it "at once a buoyancy and a holding," and persuades us of its "truth to life." Heaney's lecture not only finds a way of crediting poetry "without anxiety or apology," but it persuades us, eloquently and gracefully, of the "rightness" and "thereness" of our veritable human being.
Download or read book The Spirit Level written by Seamus Heaney and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-04-10 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of poems by the 1995 Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet.
Download or read book The Life of Words written by David-Antoine Williams and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the role that etymologies and etymological thinking have played in the works of English language poets including Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, J. H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.
