This book examines the influence of American poetry on Seamus Heaney’s achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career, including his appointments in Berkeley and Harvard. Beginning with an examination of Heaney’s education at Queen’s University, this study presents comparative close readings which explore the influence of five American poets he read during this period: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Laverty demonstrates how Heaney returned to several of these poets in response to difficulty and to consolidate later aesthetic developments. Heaney’s ambivalent critical treatment of Sylvia Plath is investigated, as is his partial misreading of Bishop, who is understood today more sensitively than in her lifetime. This study also probes the reasons for his elision of other prominent American writers, making this the first comprehensive assessment of American influence on Heaney’s poetry.

Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some 40 years that Seamus Heaney spent in the United States as a teacher, lecturer, friend, and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit. It is anchored by Heaney’s appointments at Berkeley and Harvard, but it also follows Heaney’s readings “on the road” at three important points in his career. It argues that Heaney was initially receptive to American poetry and culture while his career was still plastic, but as he developed more assurance and fame, he became much more critical of America as a superpower, especially in the military reaction to 9/11. This study emphasizes “the heard Heaney” as much as the “writerly Heaney” by listening in on key poetry readings at different times and to recorded but unpublished lectures on American and British poets at Harvard. It includes accounts by his creative writing students, aspiring poets, who testify to his mentoring as well as modeling for them how one can be “a poet in the world” as he was most strikingly.

Throughout his career in poetry, Seamus Heaney maintained roles in education and was a visible presence in the print and broadcast media. Seamus Heaney and Society presents a dynamic new engagement with one of the most celebrated poets of the modern period, examining the ways in which his work as a poet was shaped by his work as a teacher, lecturer, critic, and public figure. Drawing on a range of archival material, this book revives the varied contexts within which Heaney's work was written, published, and circulated. Mindful of the different spheres which surrounded his pursuit of poetry, it assesses his achievements and status in Ireland, Britain, and the United States through close analysis of his work in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, and manuscript drafts of key writings now held in the National Library of Ireland. Asserting the significance of the cultural, institutional, and historical worlds in which Heaney wrote and was read, Seamus Heaney and Society offers a timely reconstruction of the social lives of his work, while also exploring the ways in which he questioned and sustained the privacy and singularity of poetry. Ultimately, it considers how the enduring legacy of a great poet emerges from the working life of a contemporary writer.

An up-to-date overview of Heaney's career thus far, with detailed readings of all his major publications.

John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.

Provides insight into seven of Heaney's works along with a short biography of the poet.

The first detailed introduction to the entirety of Seamus Heaneys workThis study will enable readers to gain clearer understanding of the life and major works of Seamus Heaney. It considers literary influences on Heaney, ranging from English poets such as Wordsworth, Hughes, and Auden to Irish poets such as Kavanagh and Yeats to world poets such as Virgil and Dante. It shows how Heaney was closely attuned to poetry's impact on daily life and current events even as he articulated a convincing apologia for poetry's own life and integrity. Discussing Heaney's deep immersion in Irish Catholicism, this book demonstrates how faith influenced his belief system, poetry and politics. Finally, it also considers how deeply Heaney's artistic endeavours were intertwined with politics in Northern Ireland, especially through his embrace of constitutional nationalism but rejection of physical force republicanism.Key FeaturesIncludes sections on biography, historical, cultural and political contexts, poetry and other genres, as well as a concluding section on primary works and secondary criticismPays special attention to the marriage of form and content in the poetry and how they work together to express subtle shades of meaningOffers close readings of Heaney's canonical poems throughout his career, including the early seminal poems such as Digging, the abog poems, and his many elegies, such as Casualty, Station Island, and ClearancesDraws on drafts of the poems and prose at the Heaney archives at Emory University and the National Library of Ireland

Seamus Heaney, widely considered the most gifted living poet in Ireland and Britain, is the first Irish poet since Yeats to gain an international reputation. In this remarkable study, henry Hart discusses Heaney's poems, his creative and personal situations, and his assimilation of contemporary literary theory. From Heaney's Ulster background to poetic influences as diverse as Dante and Wordsworth, Yeats and Bly, Hart offers sophisticated, lucid insights. Hart argues that the best way into Heaney's poetic world is in seeking to understand him—as with Blake and Yeats—in terms of oppositions and conflicts, progressions and syntheses. At the root of all his work is a multifaceted argument with himself, with others, with sectarian Northern Ireland, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, with his Roman Catholicism, and with his Nationalist upbringing on a farm in County Derry. For each volume of poems, from Door into the Dark to The Haw Lantern, Hart identifies and works with a specific problem in the text, while developing its intellectual and creative implications. He covers aspects as diverse as Heaney's incorporation of antipastoral attitudes in his poems, his fascination with how etymology recapitulates ancient and modern history, and apocalypticism in North. Placing his trust in art's ability to confront conflicts between freedom and responsibility, between private craft and public involvement, Heaney is shown nonetheless to chastise himself for failing to have a greater impact on the situation he left behind in Northern Ireland. In pursuing the literary, religious, and political themes in his books of poetry, Hart shows that Heaney is no provincial bard, as some critics have suggested, but is as intellectually informed and astute as any postmodernist writer. Any reader of Seamus Heaney's poetry, and any poet, poetry scholar, critic of contemporary poetry, or student of Irish literature will gain much from reading this book.

This book traces Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's development as a poet, from his first book of poetry through his most recent, Electric Light. Each chapter examines a particular phase of Heaney's poetic career, with close, careful readings of those poems that best dramatize his crisis of identity.

This volume of twelve essays aims to comprehensively represent the abundance and variety of both Heaney's writing and scholarship on Heaney's writing. Attention is given not only to his poetry but also to his translations and his prose. The essays foreground his internationalism and the complementary international interest in his writing.