Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane

Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

– born in Northern Ireland into a Roman Catholic family, received both Catholic and Protestant education

– published pamphlets arguing for blurring the borders between the English/Irish and Protestant/Catholic in Ireland

– received the Nobel Prize for Literature (1995), his speech on the occasion tried to define the purpose of poetry

Collections

> Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969): recalls a familiar childhood landscape peopled by farmers, labourers and fishermen, influenced also by the Czech poet and biologist Miroslav Holub whose poetry is very popular in English-speaking countries

> Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975): more political collections, includes less of a private remembered landscape and more of the troubled circumstances of Northern Ireland

> Field Work (1979): the title refers both to the naturalist character of the poems and to Field Day Group which tried to redefine the idea of Ireland and included the dramatist Brian Friel or the writer and critic Seamus Deane

> Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996)

> Opened Ground: Poems 1966 – 1996 (1998): a voluminous collection of poems of the period

> The Poet & The Piper (2003): a studio recording of Heaney’s poems accompanied by Liam O’Flynn on pipes

Poems

> ‘Digging’: muses on his father and grandfather who literally dug into the earth, he will follow them with his pen

> ‘The Given Note’: a fiddler leads an untrained crowd in playing a tune which comes from nature, from the air

> ‘Bogland’: reflects on the Irish bogs which preserve the most ancient history in their peat as if in a treasure chest

> ‘The Otter’: describes an otter and his failed attempt to touch it, the otter may be a metaphor for a woman

> ‘The Tollund Man’: wonders at the miracle of a man’s body, killed in a ritual sacrifice, preserved in a bog

> ‘Postscript’: captures the fleeting nature of a moment as well as love for his windy and rainy homeland

Translations

> Sweeney Astray (1983): a translation from the Irish version of the poem

> Beowulf (1999): an acclaimed translation of the Old English epic poem

> Diary of One Who Vanished (1999): a translation of Leoš Janáček’s song cycle

Anthologies

> The School Bag (1997) and The Rattle Bag (2005): edited together with Ted Hughes, anthologies of English poetry which is fun to read, now widely used in schools in Britain and elsewhere

[READING: the Nobel speech ‘Crediting Poetry’ and selected poems – see above]

Seamus Deane (b. 1940)

– born in Northern Ireland into a Catholic nationalist family

– novelist, poet, critic, general editor of two influential anthologies of Irish writing

> The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991): a massive all-comprising anthology in three volumes

> The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (2002): in two volumes