Author Topic: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate (Read 1051 times)

islander · « **on:** September 01, 2013, 09:40:29 PM »

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islander · « **Reply #1 on:** September 01, 2013, 09:51:38 PM »

30 August 2013

Obituary: Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was internationally recognised as the greatest Irish poet since WB Yeats. Like Yeats, he won the Nobel Prize for literature and, like Yeats, his reputation and influence spread far beyond literary circles.

Heaney's poetry was always accessible and approachable

Born in Northern Ireland, he was a Catholic and nationalist who chose to live in the South. "Be advised, my passport's green / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast the Queen," he once wrote.

He came under pressure to take sides during the 25 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and faced criticism for his perceived ambivalence to republican violence, but he never allowed himself to be co-opted as a spokesman for violent extremism.

His writing addressed the conflict, however, often seeking to put it in a wider historical context. The poet also penned elegies to friends and acquaintances who died in the violence.

Describing his reticence to become a "spokesman" for the Troubles, Heaney once said he had "an early warning system telling me to get back inside my own head".

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islander · « **Reply #2 on:** September 01, 2013, 09:55:10 PM »

Born on 13 April, 1939, on a family farm in the rural heart of County Londonderry, he never forgot the world he came from. "I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss," he recalled in Personal Helicon.

He was a translator, broadcaster and prose writer of distinction, but his poetry was his most remarkable achievement, for its range, its consistent quality and its impact on readers: Love poems, epic poems, poems about memory and the past, poems about conflict and civil strife, poems about the natural world, poems addressed to friends, poems that found significance in the everyday or delighted in the possibilities of the English language.

The very first poem in his first major collection was called Digging, and it described his father digging potatoes and his grandfather digging turf. It ended:

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

Peat bog in Ireland
His roots lay deep in the Irish countryside

It proved to be his manifesto. He spent a lifetime digging with his pen, but returned often in his poetry to the landscape and society of his boyhood in a countryside of farms and small towns, where Protestant and Catholic rubbed along tolerably, if warily, and one of his earliest memories was listening to the shipping forecast on the BBC.

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islander · « **Reply #3 on:** September 01, 2013, 09:57:47 PM »

He was a bright boy: At the age of 12 he was sent on a scholarship to St Columb's College in Derry and studied for a degree in English at Queen's University in Belfast.

He became a schoolteacher, then a lecturer, at Queen's and later head of English at Carysfort College, a teacher training college near Dublin.

For more than 20 years from 1985 he spent part of each year at Harvard as a visiting professor and later Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory, and then as poet in residence. From 1989 to 1994 he was professor of poetry at Oxford.

more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13930435

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islander · « **Reply #4 on:** September 01, 2013, 10:03:43 PM »

'Everyday miracles'

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Heaney's reputation grew steadily. It helped that he was prepared to talk readily about his work, unlike many poets; and that he was a genial fellow capable of self-mockery and at ease in public.

He was known irreverently in some quarters as "famous Seamus".

His work became more "public" too: He joined the board of an Irish theatre company, Field Day, founded by the dramatist Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Rea, and in 1990 the company produced The Cure at Troy, Heaney's translation of Sophocles' tragedy Philoctetes.

Heaney was a broadcaster and raconteur alongside his teaching and writing

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islander · « **Reply #5 on:** September 01, 2013, 10:13:56 PM »

His international reputation was sealed when in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past", in the words of the Nobel citation.

He continued writing, and further honours followed. In 1996 he won the Whitbread Prize for his translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. In 2009, he was awarded the Â£40,000 David Cohen Prize by Arts Council England for a lifetime's achievement.

District and Circle, published in 2006, won the TS Eliot Prize for poetry. The critics were struck by the title poem, about a journey on the London Underground in the wake of the 7 July bombings, which also evoked the medieval Italian poet Dante's vision of hell in his Inferno.

It was characteristic of Heaney who, as well as being a farmer's boy, was also exceedingly bookish and erudite.

Seamus Heaney and family at Nobel ceremony
His Nobel citation referred to "works of lyrical beauty"

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islander · « **Reply #6 on:** September 01, 2013, 10:15:22 PM »

By the end, Heaney had acquired a reputation not only for cleverness but for wisdom, a poet who took seriously his role (he called it "a vocation") and was prepared to engage with the real world in work that was accessible and approachable.

And he had readers in high places. Nine days before the announcement that he had won the Nobel Prize, President Bill Clinton, no less, at a state banquet in Dublin Castle quoted the closing lines from The Cure At Troy, as Northern Ireland crept tentatively towards peace:

Now it's high watermark

And floodtide in the heart

And time to go...

What's left to say?

Suspect too much sweet talk

But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind

That blew me here. I leave

Half-ready to believe

That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #7 on:** September 02, 2013, 11:04:05 AM »

Here's a classic by Seamus Heaney, written early on in his amazing literary career:

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

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islander · « **Reply #8 on:** September 03, 2013, 01:04:04 AM »

ooops, let me reach out for a tissue first. i think my eyes are moist after reading this poem...

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Author Topic: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate (Read 1051 times)

islander

Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

islander

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

islander

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

islander

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

islander

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

islander

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

islander

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

hubag bohol

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate

islander

Re: Seamus Heaney, 74, Nobel Laureate