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.

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

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

Andrew Murphy charts the trajectory of Heaney's career as a poet and places his work within its various contexts.

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

Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish “Troubles” beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and map—the spirit region, that world beyond our ken. In Seamus Heaney’s Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that Heaney’s regions—the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one—offer the best entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaney’s body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. As Russell shows, Heaney believed in the power of ideas—and the texts representing them—to begin resolving historical divisions. For Russell, Heaney’s regionalist poetry contains a “Hegelian synthesis” view of history that imagines potential resolutions to the conflicts that have plagued Ireland and Northern Ireland for centuries. Drawing on extensive archival and primary material by the poet, Seamus Heaney’s Regions examines Heaney’s work from before his first published poetry volume, Death of a Naturalist in 1966, to his most recent volume, the elegiac Human Chain in 2010, to provide the most comprehensive treatment of the poet’s work to date.

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.

Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide biographical and critical information on major and lesser-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers, and includes articles on key schools of literature, and genres.

Provides an account of Seamus Heaney's early life, and the experiences, influences and relationships - personal, literary and political - that shaped his poetic development. The book includes photographs, interviews and commentary on unpublished poems and drafts.

A fresh, accessible and authoritative study that conveys the richness and diversity of Irish poets, their lives and times.