Seamus Heaney The Irish voice of the earth

Seamus Heaney The Irish voice of the earth Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney 1. Life • Born into a Catholic family in 1939 in the county of Derry, Northern Ireland. • At school became aware of the religious and cultural division of Ulster. • Graduated in English Language and Literature in Belfast in 1961. Only Connect. . . New Directions Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney 1. Life • In 1970 and 1971, Heaney worked at the University of California, Berkeley. This accelerated the “politicisation” of his poetry could become “a mode of resistance”. Seamus Heaney Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 2. Works 1966 Death of a Naturalist. 1969 Door into the Dark: involvement in the civil rights movement. Seamus Heaney 1972 Wintering Out: his response to the increasing complexity of the Irish question after the irruption into Northern affairs of the Provisional IRA. Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 2. Works 1975 North: the result of Heaney’s meditation on his reading P. V. Glob’s The Bog People and its account of propitiatory Iron Age ritual killings in Jutland. Seamus Heaney 1980 Selected Poems, Preoccupations (a collection of prose pieces). 1984 Station Island. Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 2. Works 1987 The Haw Lantern. 1991 Seeing Things: return to some of the memories of his childhood, especially in the sequence of the sonnets dedicated to his mother’s death. Seamus Heaney 1996 The Spirit Level. 2001 Electric Light. Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 3. The voice of the earth • Rural County Derry is the “country of the mind”. • Emphasis on human work: ploughing and digging, butterchurning, the blackberry and potato picking. Ardmore, Ireland Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 3. The voice of the earth • The interchange between man and nature enlarges the poet’s consciousness. • The poet is intimately involved with his own community, the inheritor of rural traditions of labour and service. Ardmore, Ireland Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 4. Heaney and politics Always present in Heaney’s poetry is the shadow of the violent conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland. French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass. Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 4. Heaney and politics Poetry is split between a need for creative freedom and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as a citizen. French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass. Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 5. The poet’s task is not to condemn, but to draw back and examine the historical reasons and psychological consequences behind them. this gives his work universal meaning and almost mythic resonance. Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 6. The elegiac Heaney The poems evoke figures who suffer some kind of human diminishment: isolation, repression, disenchantment, exploitation or betrayal. They stand for those historically dispossessed and maltreated, and act as exemplars of suffering and endurance. Only Connect. . . New Directions

Seamus Heaney 7. Death and memory The recognition of death is an absolute necessity for a poet, because it is only then that the writer's soul can open up to what the wider universe has to say, what matters in this life, and what our forefathers can teach us. Only Connect. . . New Directions Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney 8. Style • Presence of a speaker viewing the story from his own particular place and time. • A quatrain form where there is: - the dissolving of line into line and image into image - the use of enjambement - two stresses to a line, like the half-line of Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre - use of the colon or its equivalent, the dash - imitation of Anglo-Saxon kennings - precision of technical terms Only Connect. . . New Directions