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Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney (born April 13 1939) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer from County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Life

Seamus Heaney was born the eldest of nine children, at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, near Castledawson, in County Londonderry, thirty miles to the north-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He was brought up a Catholic and a nationalist (and as such calls the county of his birth "County Derry"). He regards himself as Irish, not British, as he made known publicly when a publication referred to him as "British", due to the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practising for the D-Day landings. His family moved to a bigger farm, at Bellaghy, in 1953.

He was educated initially at the local Anahorish primary school. He won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry, and it was while studying here as a young teenager that his family moved to Bellaghy. At St. Columb's he was taught the Irish language. In 1957 Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at the Queen's University of Belfast. He graduated in 1961 with a First Class Honours degree. During teacher training at St Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast, he went on a placement to St Thomas' Intermediate School in west Belfast. The headmaster of this school was the writer Michael MacLaverty from County Monaghan, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. In 1963 he became a lecturer at St Josephs. In spring of 1963, after contributing various articles to local magazines, he came to the attention of Philip Hobsbaum, then an English lecturer at Queen's University. Hobsbaum was to set up a Belfast Group of local young poets (to mirror the success he had with the London group) and this would bring Heaney into contact with other Belfast poets such as Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.

In August 1965 he married Marie Devlin, a school teacher who was originally from Ardboe, County Tyrone. (Devlin is a writer herself and, in 1994, published Over Nine Waves a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) His first book, Eleven Poems, was published in November 1965 for The Queen's University Festival. In 1966, Faber and Faber published his first volume called Death of a Naturalist. This collection met with much critical acclaim and went on to win a host of awards. Also in 1966 he was appointed as a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast and his first son, Michael, was born. A second son, Christopher, was born in 1968. In 1968, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called Room to Rhyme, which led to quite a lot of exposure for the poet's work. In 1969 Door into the Dark was published.

After a spell as guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley he returned to Queen's University in 1971. In 1972, Heaney left his lectureship at Belfast and moved to the Republic of Ireland, working as a teacher at Carysfort College in Dublin. In 1972 Wintering Out was published, and over the next few years Heaney began to give readings throughout Ireland, Britain and the United States. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. He became an elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1975 Heaney published his fourth volume, North. He became Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin in 1976, and moved his family to Dublin the same year. His next volume, Field Work, was published in 1979.

Selected Poems and Preoccupations: Selected Prose was published in 1980. In 1981 he left Carysfort to become visiting professor at Harvard University, and in 1982 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Queens' University in Belfast. In 1983, along with Brian Friel and Stephen Rea he co-founded Field Day Publishing and in 1984 published Station Island. Also in 1984, Heaney was elected to the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, but later that year his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney, died. In 1987 his volume, The Haw Lantern, was published, but soon after publication, his father, Patrick, died. In 1988 a collection of critical essays entitled The Government of the Tongue was published.

In 1989, he was elected to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, which he held for a five-year term to 1994 (not requiring residence in Oxford). Throughout this period he was dividing his time between Ireland and America. He also continued to give public readings, which were very popular. In 1986, Heaney received a Litt.D. from Bates College. So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed 'Heaneyboppers' suggesting an almost pop-music fanaticism on the part of his supporters.

In 1990 The Cure At Troy, a play based on Greek legend, was published to much acclaim. In 1991, Seeing Things, was published. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Nobel committee described as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". In 1996, his collection, The Spirit Level was published and won The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, a feat repeated in 1999 by his re-translation of the epic Beowulf.

Career

Heaney's work often deals with "the local"—that is, his surroundings and everything inclusive of them. Inevitably this means Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland. Hints of sectarian violence, which began just as his writing career did, can be found in many of his poems, even works that on the surface appear to deal with something else. Despite his many travels much of his work appears to be set in rural Derry, the county of his childhood. Like the troubles themselves, Heaney's work is deeply associated with the lessons of history, sometimes even prehistory. Many of his works concern his own family history and focus on characters in his own family: they can be read as elegies for those family members. He has acknowledged this trend.

The Anglo-Saxon influences in his work are also noteworthy, his university study of the language having had a profound effect on his work. It also led to a small revival of interest in the verse forms of Anglo-Saxon poetry amongst a number of poets influenced by Heaney. He has also written critically well regarded essays and two plays. His essays, among other things, have been credited with beginning the critical re-examination of Thomas Hardy. His anthologies (edited with friend Ted Hughes) The Rattle Bag and The School Bag are used extensively in schools in the UK and elsewhere. In addition to his original works, Heaney has published translations, including a highly regarded verse translation of Beowulf from Old English in 1999, and a version of Sophocles' Antigone titled The Burial at Thebes in 2004.

His influence on contemporary poetry is reckoned to be immense. Robert Lowell has called Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats". A good many others have echoed the sentiment. His influence is not restricted to Ireland but is felt world wide. However some critics have attacked Heaney for not dealing more directly with the political situation in Northern Ireland. u all smell like gay

Trivia

A cousin of Heaney's, Calum (or Colm) McCartney, was killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Seamus Heaney was a friend of the late fellow Derryman and writer, Brian Moore, whom he visited at Moore's home in Malibu, California.

Bibliography

Poetry

Translations

  • Sweeney Astray: A version from the Irish (Field Day, 1983)
  • The Midnight Verdict :Translations from the Irish of Brian Merriman and from the Metamorphoses of Ovid (Gallery Press, 1993)
  • Jan Kochanowski: Laments (Faber & Faber, 1995)
  • Beowulf (Faber & Faber, 1999)
  • Diary of One who Vanished (Faber & Faber, 1999)

Essays

  • Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (Faber & Faber, 1980)
  • The Government of the Tongue (Faber & Faber, 1988)
  • The Place of Writing (Emory University, 1989)
  • The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (Faber & Faber, 1995)
  • Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (Gallery Press, 1995)
  • Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Faber & Faber, 2002)

Plays

  • The Cure at Troy A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (Field Day, 1990)
  • The Burial at Thebes A version of Sophocles' Antigone (Faber & Faber, 2004)

About Heaney

  • The Poetry of Seamus Heaney ed. by Elmer Andrews (1993) ISBN 0231119267
  • "Seamus Heaney" by Helen Vendler (2000) ISBN 0674002059

See also

References

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