Seamus Heaney's prose poetics return repeatedly to the adequacy of poetry, its ameliorative, restorative response to the violence of public historical life. It is a curiously equivocal ideal, and as such most clearly demonstrates the intellectual origins, the humanist character, and the inherent strains of these poetics, the work of one of the world's leading poet-critics of the last thirty years. Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry is the first study of the development of Heaney's thought and its central theme. Eschewing the tendency of Heaney critics to endorse or expand on the poet's poetics in largely adulatory terms, it draws on archival as well as print sources to trace the emerging dualistic shape, redemptive logic, and post-Christian nature of Heaney's thought, from his undergraduate formation to the expansive affirmations of his late cultural poetics. Through a meticulous and wholly new examination of Heaney's revisions to previously published prose, it reveals the logical strain of his conceptual constructions, so that it becomes acutely apparent just how appropriate that ambivalent ideal 'adequacy' is. This book takes seriously the post-Christian, frequently religious tenor of Heaney's language, explicating the character of his thought while exposing its limits: Heaney's belief in poetry's adequacy ultimately constitutes an Arnoldian substitute for—indeed, an 'afterimage' of—Christian belief. This is the deep significance of the idea of adequacy to Heaney's thought: it allows us to identify precisely the late humanist character and the limits of his troubled trust in poetry.

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.

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.

The complete translations of the poet Seamus Heaney, a Nobel laureate and prolific, revolutionary translator. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, published in 1999, was immediately hailed as an undisputed masterpiece, “something imperishable and great” (James Wood, The Guardian). A few years after his death in 2013, his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI caused a similar stir, providing “a remarkable and fitting epilogue to one of the great poetic careers of recent times” (Nick Laird, Harper’s Magazine). Now, for the first time, the poet, critic, and essayist’s translations are gathered in one volume. Heaney translated not only classic works of Latin and Old English but also a great number of poems from Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Russian, German, Scottish Gaelic, Czech, Ancient and Modern Greek, Middle and Modern French, and Medieval and Modern Italian, among other languages. In particular, the Nobel laureate engaged with works in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish, the languages of his homeland and early education. As he said, “If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood, you lived in a primal Gaeltacht.” In The Translations of Seamus Heaney, Marco Sonzogni has collected Heaney’s translations and framed them with the poet’s own writings on his works and their composition, sourced from introductions, interviews, and commentaries. Through this volume, we come closer to grasping the true extent of Heaney’s extraordinary abilities and his genius.

This Strange Loneliness is the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth. Peter Mackay explores how Heaney repeatedly turns to the Romantic poet's work for inspiration, corroboration, and amplification, and as a model for the fortifying power of poetry itself, which offers the fundamental lesson that "it is on this earth 'we find our happiness, or not at all.'" Through an in-depth look at archival materials, and at uncollected poems and prose by Heaney, Mackay traces the evolution of Heaney's readings of Wordsworth throughout his career, revealing their shared interest in the connections between poetry and education, the possibility of a beneficial understanding of poetic influence, the complexities of place and displacement, ideas of transcendence, and ultimately the importance of "late style": later poems by Wordsworth might prove a cautionary tale, as well as example, for any poet. Placing Heaney's readings within their political, historical, and poetic contexts the book also explores how he negotiated the complex relationship between Irish and British culture and identity to claim a persistent form of kinship, and forge a strange community, with the Romantic poet. With illuminating readings that reveal new contexts to and currents in Heaney's work, This Strange Loneliness is a powerful evocation of the Irish poet's sense of the "uplift" that poetry can provide.

How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets: Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it. Exploring these two poets via their shared preoccupation with poetry's moral exemplarity opens up new perspectives on their work. The concept of exemplarity is shown to play an important role in these poets' most significant preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to literary influence to memorialisation, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this new analysis of poetry, critical prose, drama, and archival materials, this book offers a major new study of ethics in the later period of these two writers—including recent underexplored posthumous works. In turn, the book also makes an important intervention in larger debates about literature and morality, and about the field of ethical criticism itself: this is the first book-length study to expand ethical criticism beyond its customary narrative focus. The ethical criticism of fiction is often an exercise in methodological advocacy, urging the use of more literary examples in moral philosophy. As this book shows, including poetry among these examples introduces new, lyric-inflected caveats about the use of literature as a form of moral example: caveats which remain invisible in narrative-centred ethical criticism.

Paul Muldoon was looking west long before he left Ireland for the United States in 1987, and his Transatlantic departure would prove to be a turning point in his life and work. In America, Muldoon's creative repertoire has extended into song writing, libretti, and literary criticism, while his poetry collections have extended to outlandish proportions, typified in recent years by a level of formal intensity that is unique in modern poetry. To leave Northern Ireland, though, is not necessarily to leave it behind. Muldoon has spoken of his 'sense of belonging to several places at once,' and in the United States he has found another creative gear, new modes of performance facilitated by his Irish émigré status. Focusing on the protean work of his American period, this book explores Muldoon's expansive structural imagination, his investment in Eros and errors, the nimbleness of his allusive practice as both a reader and writer, and the mobility of his Transatlantic position. It raises questions about the Irish poet as a westward voyager, about Irish-American cultural exchange, and how departures for Muldoon seem to be a precondition for return, indeed returns of many different kinds. It also draws on archival research to produce provocative new readings of Muldoon's later works. Exploring the poetic and literary-critical 'long forms' that are now his hallmark, this volume places the most significant works of Muldoon's American period under the microscope, and opens up the intricate formal schemes of a poet Mick Imlah credits as having 'reinvented the possibilities of rhyme for our time.'

This book scrutinizes Heaney's language in order to examine his theory of poetry and the writer's responsibility to art and politics. The author, himself a poet, works chronologically through the poetry and discusses it in light of Heaney's writings on the appropriate language of poetry. Chapters also look at Heaney's language and at the government of the tongue.

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

"Poetry born of historical upheaval bears witness both to actual historical events and considerations of poetics. Under the duress of history the poet, who is torn between lamentation and celebration, seeks to achieve distance from his troubled times. Add to this a deep love for and commitment to the Irish and English poetic traditions, and a strong desire to search for models outside his culture, and you have the poetry of the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-). In this study, Carmen Bugan looks at how the poetry of Seamus Heaney, born of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has encountered the'historically-tested imaginations' of Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, as he aimed to fulfil a Horatian poetics, a poetry meant to both instruct and delight its readers. Carmen Bugan is the author of a collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians, and a memoir, Burying the Typewriter."