Seamus Heaney: Contemporary Literature of the English-Speaking World

Author and Work (or Works) Reviewed:

Seamus Heaney

English and Chinese names:

Michelle

Yang Rong

Student Number:

130110131

Course:

Contemporary Literature of the English-Speaking World

Teacher:

Dr. David Jenkins

Date Submitted:

29th, May, 2015

    Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is an Irish poet who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He was a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended a local primary school. He watched American soldiers on manoeuvres in the local fields when he was young. They were stationed at an aerodrome which had been built near his home and Heaney has taken this image of himself as a consciousness poised between "history and ignorance" as representative of the nature of his poetic life and development. He had this “country of mind” even though he didn’t spent much of his life in the country. Heaney taught himself Latin and Irish when he was studying at St. Columb’s College, these two languages, together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study at Queen’s University, were the determine factors in many of the developments and retrenchments which have marked his progress as a poet. Some of the verses he wrote during this time are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-Saxon note in English. And his poetic line was much more resolutely stressed and packed than it would be when the Mediterranean elements became more pronounced.

Heaney’s poems came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was one of those poets who were recognized as constituting something of a “Northern School” within Irish writing. He had the fate of having been born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust, and this had not only effected of darkening the mood of his work in the 1970s but also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry’s responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen.

Heaney married Marie Devlin and since then this women had become the central to his life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his oeuvre right down to the most recent, and making it possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying on in Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the family home. After a year of lecturing at University of California, Heaney decided to resign his lectureship in order to work full time as a poet and free-lance writer. In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. In 1996, subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Heaney died on 30 August 2013.

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