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Seamus Heaney

 
Biography: Seamus Justin Heaney
 
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The poetry of Seamus Justin Heaney (born 1939) reveals his skill with language and his command of form and technique. In his poems, Heaney balances personal, topical, and universal themes. He approaches his themes from a modest perspective, creating depth of meaning and insight while remaining accessible to a wide audience.

Seamus Justin Heaney's attempts to develop poetic language in which meaning and sound are intimately related result in concentrated, sensually evocative poems characterized by assonant phrasing, richly descriptive adjectives, and witty metaphors. Critics note that Heaney is concerned with many of contemporary Northern Ireland's social and cultural divisions. For example, Irish and Gaelic colloquialisms are often intermingled with more direct and straightforward English words for a language that is both resonant and controlled. Viewing the art of poetry as a craft, Heaney stresses the importance of technique as a means to channel creative energies toward sophisticated metaphysical probings. He explores a wide range of subjects in his poems, including such topics as nature, love, the relationship between contemporary issues and historical patterns, and legend and myth. Although some critics debate Robert Lowell's assessment of him as "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," they agree that Heaney is a poet of consistent achievement. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

Born April 13, 1939, Heaney's childhood in a rural area near Ulster, Northern Ireland, informs much of his poetry, including his first volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), for which he won immediate popular and critical success. In most of these poems, Heaney describes a young man's responses to beautiful and threatening aspects of nature. In "Digging," the poem which opens this volume, he evokes the rural landscape where he was raised and comments on the care and skill with which his father and ancestors farmed the land. Heaney announces that as a poet he will metaphorically "dig" with his pen. In many of the poems in his next volume, Door into the Dark (1969), he probes beneath the surface of things to search for hidden meaning. Along with pastoral poems, Heaney focuses on rural laborers and the craftsmanship they display in their work.

Heaney left Northern Ireland when the "troubles" resumed in 1969. After teaching in the United States, he settled with his family in the Republic of Ireland. The poems in Wintering Out (1972) reveal a gradual shift from personal to public themes. Heaney begins to address the social unrest in Northern Ireland by taking the stance of commentator rather than participant. After having read P. V. Glob's The Bog People, an account of the discovery of well-preserved, centuries-old bodies found in Danish bogs, Heaney wrote a series of poems about Irish bogs. Some of the bodies found in Danish bogs are believed to have been victims of primitive sacrificial rituals, and in Wintering Out Heaney projects a historical pattern of violence that unites the ancient victims with those who have died in contemporary troubles. In North (1975), which some consider his finest collection, Heaney continues to use history and myth to pattern the universality of violence. The poems in this volume reflect his attempt to tighten his lyrics with more concrete language and images.

The poems in Field Work (1979) concern a wide range of subjects. Critics praised several love poems dealing with marriage, particularly "The Harvest Bow," which Harold Bloom called "a perfect lyric." In the ten-poem sequence "The Glanmore Sonnets," Heaney describes a lush landscape and muses on such universal themes as love and mortality, ultimately finding order, meaning, and renewal in art. Other books of significance by Heaney include Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (1980) and Sweeney Astray (1984). The former, which includes prose pieces on the origins and development of his poetry as well as essays on other poets, lends insight into Heaney's poetics. Sweeney Astray, a story-poem based on the ancient Irish tale Buile Suibhne, relates the adventures of Suibhne, or Sweeney, as he is transformed from a warrior-king into a bird because of a curse. The narrative follows Sweeney's exile from humanity and his wanderings and hardships as a bird, mixing prose descriptions of events with lyrical renderings of Sweeney's ravings as he responds to the harshness and beauty of nature.

Heaney's next volume of poetry, Station Island (1984), is made up of three sections. The opening part consists of lyrical poems about events in everyday life. The title sequence, which comprises the second section, is based on a three-day pilgrimage undertaken by Irish Catholics to Station Island, where they seek spiritual renewal. While on Station Island, Heaney ruminates on personal and historical events and encounters the souls of dead acquaintances and Irish literary figures who inspire him to reflect upon his life and art. In the third section, "Sweeney Redivivus," Heaney takes on the persona of Sweeney, attempting to recreate Sweeney's highly sensitized vision of life. Although critics debated the success of the three individual sections, most agreed that Station Island is an accomplished work that displays the range of Heaney's talents.

Further Reading

Abse, Dannie, editor, Best of the Poetry Year 6, Robson, 1979.

Begley, Monie, Rambles in Ireland, Devin-Adair, 1977.

Broadbridge, Edward, editor, Seamus Heaney, Danmarks Radio (Copenhagen), 1977.

Brown, Terence, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, Rowman & Littlefield, 1975.

Buttel, Robert, Seamus Heaney, Bucknell University Press, 1975.

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography: Contemporary Writers, 1960 to the Present, Gale, 1992.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 25, 1983, Volume 37, 1986.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Seamus Justin Heaney
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(born April 13, 1939, near Castledàwson, County Londonderry, N.Ire.) Irish poet. After studying at Queen's University in Belfast, he became a teacher and lecturer. Appalled by the violence in his native Northern Ireland, he moved to the republic of Ireland in 1972. From the 1980s he taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. His works, rooted in Northern Irish rural life, evoke historical events and draw on Irish myth, but they also reflect the land's recent troubled decades. His collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), North (1975), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), and District and Circle (2006). Preoccupations (1980) and Finders Keepers (2002) include essays on poetry and poets. He also made a noteworthy translation of Beowulf. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

For more information on Seamus Justin Heaney, visit Britannica.com.

 
Irish Literature Companion: Seamus [Justin] Heaney
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Home > Library > Literature & Language > Irish Literature Companion

Heaney, Seamus [Justin] (1939- ), poet. Born in Co. Derry, he was educated at St Columb's College and QUB. He taught for a year and then became a lecturer at QUB. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), is rooted in childhood experiences of life in rural Co. Derry. Door into the Dark (1969) shows a willingness to go beyond the familiar into the unknown. Wintering Out (1972) deals with exposure and endurance in poems that are circumspect about the re-emergent civil and sectarian conflict of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Relaxing his former grip on the physical world, the poet now works through more nebulous intimations in his search for symbols adequate to the conflict. In 1972 Heaney moved from Belfast to Glanmore, Co. Wicklow, working for a time as a freelance writer and then at Carysfort College in Co. Dublin. North (1975) was his most controversial volume. The poetry involves a profound ambivalence of feeling, recognizing on the one hand the grounds for ‘civilized outrage’ at atrocity and on the other the impulse towards ‘intimate revenge’. In Field Work (1979) a new voice is heard, and there is a movement outwards into the light. A central sequence entitled ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ contains mature love-poems that reflect a rueful awakening to life's tangled issues. A selection of Heaney's critical writings (Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978) appeared in 1980. The following year he accepted a post as Visiting Professor at Harvard where, in 1984, he was elected Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry. 1982 saw the publication of a children's poetry anthology, The Rattle Bag, co-edited with Ted Hughes. In 1983 Sweeney Astray, Heaney's translation of the Middle Irish romance Buile Shuibne, was published by Field Day, the Derry theatre company of which he had been a Director since its formation in 1980. The centrepiece of Heaney's next collection, Station Island (1984), is the title-poem, set at Lough Derg, a traditional site of pilgrimage. The poem dramatizes a series of dream encounters with literary ghosts and dead figures from his personal history. The Haw Lantern (1987) is coloured by a newly-political language, conditioned by Heaney's admiration for Eastern European poets such as Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz. The T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury in 1986 were published as The Government of the Tongue (1988)—a title which underlines Heaney's conviction that poetry is a form of responsible language. The Cure at Troy (1990), a play based on Sophocles' Philoctetes, and first performed by Field Day, dramatizes questions of personal conscience, duty, and loyalty to the tribe. In 1989 he was elected to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford. Seeing Things (1991) attests to a continued attentiveness to everyday reality, but also shows a concern with a metaphysical vision. This book evinces a buoyant confidence and a relaxed visionary quality. In 1993 he issued The Midnight Verdict, a verse translation of extracts from Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche bracketed by versions from Ovid's Metamorphosis, a juxtaposition allowing him to present a view of gender conflict. The Redress of Poetry (1995), was collected in Oxford Lectures, and in that year he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. In The Spirit Level (1997) a tough allegiance is evoked, while the poetry seeks to reconcile deep divisions. Beowulf (1999) is a deeply-felt version of the Anglo-Saxon warrior-epic.

Bibliography

Bernard O'Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1994).

 
Wikipedia: Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney addresses the Law Society (University College Dublin), 2009
Born 13 April 1939 (1939-04-13) (age 70)
In Bellaghy, Northern Ireland
Occupation Poet
Writing period 1966–present
Notable award(s) Nobel Prize in Literature
1995
Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings
2001

Seamus Heaney (pronounced /ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/) (born 13 April 1939 [1]) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He currently lives in Dublin.[2]

Contents

Early life

Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939 into a family of nine children at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toomebridge in Northern Ireland. In 1953, his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away, which is now the family home. His father, Patrick Heaney, owned and worked a small farm of fifty acres in County Londonderry[3], but his real commitment was to cattle-dealing, to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents. Seamus' mother came from the McCann family, whose uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and whose aunt had worked as a maid to the mill owners' family. The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background.[citation needed]

Heaney was educated initially at Anahorish Primary School in Toome, County Antrim. When he was twelve-years-old, he won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in the city of Derry. At St. Columb's, he was taught Latin and Irish, and these languages, together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study while a student of Queen's University, Belfast, were determining factors in many of the developments and retrenchments which have marked his progress as a poet.

Heaney's brother, Christopher, was killed in a road accident at the age of four (while Heaney was studying at St. Columb's). Heaney wrote two poems reflecting on the death of Christopher

Career

In 1957, Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at the Queen's University of Belfast. During his time in Belfast he found a copy of Ted Hughes' Lupercal, which spurred him to write poetry. "Suddenly, the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life" he has said.[5] He graduated in 1961 with a First Class Honours degree. During teacher training at St Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast, he went on a placement to St Thomas' secondary Intermediate School in west Belfast. The headmaster of this school was the writer Michael MacLaverty from County Monaghan, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. In 1963 he became a lecturer at St Joseph's. In the spring of 1963, after contributing various articles to local magazines, he came to the attention of Philip Hobsbaum, then an English lecturer at Queen's University. Hobsbaum was to set up a Belfast Group of local young poets (to mirror the success he had with the London group) and this would bring Heaney into contact with other Belfast poets such as Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.

In August 1965 he married Marie Devlin, a school teacher and native of Ardboe, County Tyrone. (Devlin is a writer herself and, in 1994, published Over Nine Waves, a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) Seamus Heaney's first book, Eleven Poems, was published in November 1965 for the Queen's University Festival. In 1967, Faber and Faber published his first major volume, called Death of a Naturalist. This collection met with much critical acclaim and went on to win several awards. Also in 1966, he was appointed as a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast and his first son, Michael, was born. A second son, Christopher, was born in 1968. In 1968, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called Room to Rhyme, which led to much exposure for the poet's work. In 1969, his second major volume, Door into the Dark, was published.

Seamus Heaney in 1970

After a spell as guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Queen's University in 1971. In 1972, Heaney left his lectureship at Belfast and moved to Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, working as a teacher at Carysfort College. In 1972, Wintering Out was published, and over the next few years Heaney began to give readings throughout Ireland, Britain, and the United States. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. He became an elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1975, Heaney published his fourth volume, North. He became Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin in 1976, and moved his family to Dublin the same year. His next volume, Field Work, was published in 1979.

Selected Poems 1965-1975 and Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 were published in 1980. In 1981, he left Carysfort to become visiting professor at Harvard University. He was awarded two honorary doctorates, from Queen's University, and, from, Fordham University in New York City, in 1982. At the Fordham commencement ceremony in 1982, Heaney delivered the commencement address in a 46-stanza poem entitled "Verses for a Fordham Commencement".

As he was born and educated in Northern Ireland, Heaney has felt the need to emphasise that he is Irish and not British. For example, he objected to his inclusion in the 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by writing: "Be advised, my passport's green / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast the Queen."

Following the success of the Field Day Theatre Company's production of Brian Friel's Translations, Heaney joined the company's expanded Board of Directors in 1981, when the company's founders Brian Friel and Stephen Rea decided to make the company a permanent group. In 1984, Heaney was elected to the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Later that year, his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney, died. His father, Patrick, died soon after publication of the 1987 volume, The Haw Lantern. In 1988, a collection of critical essays called The Government of the Tongue was published.

In 1989, he was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, which he held for a five-year term to 1994. The chair does not require residence in Oxford, and throughout this period he was dividing his time between Ireland and America. He also continued to give very popular public readings. In 1986, Heaney received a Litt.D. from Bates College. So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed "Heaneyboppers", suggesting an almost pop-music fanaticism on the part of his supporters.[6]

In 1990, The Cure at Troy, a play based on Sophocles' Philoctetes,[7] was published to much acclaim. In 1991, Seeing Things was published. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Nobel committee described as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". In 1996, his collection The Spirit Level was published and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. He repeated that success with the release of Beowulf: A New Translation.[8]

In 1998, Heaney officially opened the library of Saint Catherine's College, Armagh.

In 2002, Heaney was awarded an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University and delivered a public lecture on “The Guttural Muse”.[9]

In 2003, the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry was opened at Queens University, Belfast. It houses the Heaney Media Archive, a unique record of Heaney's entire oeuvre, along with a full catalogue of his radio and television presentations.[10] That same year Heaney decided to lodge a substantial portion of his literary archive at Emory University.[11] He also composed a poem called Beacons of Bealtaine for the 2004 EU Enlargement. The poem was read by Heaney at a ceremony for the twenty-five leaders of the enlarged European Union arranged by the Irish EU presidency.

In 2003, when asked if there was any figure in popular culture who aroused interest in poetry and lyrics, Heaney praised controversy-ridden rap artist Eminem for his verbal energy.[12][13]

There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.

Heaney suffered a stroke from which he recovered in August 2006, but cancelled all public engagements for several months. [14] Heaney's latest volume of poetry, District and Circle, won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize.[15]

In 2008 Heaney became artist of honour in Østermarie, Denmark. Seamus Heaney Stræde was therefore named after him in the center of Bornholm, another green island. In February 2009, Heaney was presented with an Honorary-Life Membership award from the UCD Law Society, in recognition of his remarkable role as a literary figure. In 2009 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Context

Heaney's work often deals with the local—that is, his surroundings in Ireland, particularly in Northern Ireland, where he was born. Allusions to sectarian difference, widespread in Northern Ireland, can be found in his poems, but these are never predominant or strident. His poetry is not often overtly political or militant, and is far more concerned with profound observations of the small details of the everyday, far beyond contingent political concerns. Some of his work is concerned with the lessons of history, and indeed prehistory and the very ancient. Other works concern his personal family history, focusing on characters in his family and as he has acknowledged, these poems can be read as elegies for those family members. But primarily, his concern as a poet is with the English language, partly as it is spoken in Ireland but also as spoken elsewhere and in other times; the Anglo-Saxon influences in his work are noteworthy, and his academic studies of that language have had a profound effect on his work. Thanks to Heaney, there has been a minor revival of interest in the verse forms of Anglo-Saxon poetry amongst a number of poets influenced by him. He has also written critically well-regarded essays and two plays. His essays, among other things, have been credited with beginning the critical re-examination of Thomas Hardy. His anthologies (edited with friend Ted Hughes), The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, are used extensively in schools in the U.K. and elsewhere. In the UK many of his works are studied in the GCSE English Literature exam (AQA board).

But despite the inherently Irish flavour of his language, Heaney is a universal poet. His influence on contemporary poetry is immense. Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." A good many others have echoed the sentiment.[citation needed] His books make up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the UK.[16]

Seamus and Marie Heaney at the Dominican Church, Kraków, Poland, 4 October 1996

Political View

In each of Heaney’s poems is an underlying implication of Heaney’s political views. In Requiem for the Croppies Heaney says, the ‘barley grew up out of the grave’ and in doing so reflects on how little nationalists in Ulster appreciate the martyrs who died for the cause. In the poems throughout his collection Wintering Out, Heaney embellishes this, particularly in Gifts of Rain. At first read the poem regards a simple river akin to the poem Broagh. However, in the line ‘I cock my ear / at an absence’, Heaney refers to those who have died and have worked to unite Ireland without violence. He asks for help to go back in time to hear advice from those who have made a difference in uniting Ireland: ‘Soft voices of the dead are whispering by the shore’. The use of water as the central imagery throughout the poem, reflects the nature of being purged, coming out clean with a fresh beginning. Heaney’s ability to be ‘firmly rooted in reality’ is most clearly shown in each poem through his ability to connect everyday landscapes (such as the River Moyola) to the political situation in Ireland.

Bibliography

Poetry, Main Collections

Poetry, Collected Editions

  • 1980: Selected Poems 1965-1975, Faber & Faber
  • 1990: New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Faber & Faber
  • 1998: Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, Faber & Faber

Prose, Main collections

  • 1980: Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, Faber & Faber
  • 1988: The Government of the Tongue, Faber & Faber
  • 1995: The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, Faber & Faber
  • 2002: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, Faber & Faber

Plays

Translations

Limited Editions and Booklets (Poetry & Prose)

  • 1965: Eleven Poems, Queen's University
  • 1968: The Island People, BBC
  • 1968: Room to Rhyme, Arts Council N.I.
  • 1969: A Lough Neagh Sequence, Phoenix
  • 1970: Night Drive, Gilbertson
  • 1970: A Boy Driving His Father to Confession, Sceptre Press
  • 1973: Explorations, BBC
  • 1975: Stations, Ulsterman Publications
  • 1975: Bog Poems, Rainbow Press
  • 1975: The Fire i' the Flint, Oxford University Press
  • 1976: Four Poems, Crannog Press
  • 1977: Glanmore Sonnets, Editions Monika Beck
  • 1977: In Their Element, Arts Council N.I.
  • 1978: Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address and an Elegy, Faber & Faber
  • 1978: The Makings of a Music, University of Liverpool
  • 1978: After Summer, Gallery Press
  • 1979: Hedge School, Janus Press
  • 1979: Ugolino, Carpenter Press
  • 1979: Gravities, Charlotte Press
  • 1979: A Family Album, Byron Press
  • 1980: Toome, National College of Art and Design
  • 1981: Sweeney Praises the Trees, Henry Pearson
  • 1982: A Personal Selection, Ulster Museum
  • 1982: Poems and a Memoir, Limited Editions Club
  • 1983: An Open Letter, Field Day
Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University, Belfast
  • 1983: Among Schoolchildren, Queen's University
  • 1984: Verses for a Fordham Commencement, Nadja Press
  • 1984: Hailstones, Gallery Press
  • 1985: From the Republic of Conscience, Amnesty International
  • 1985: Place and Displacement, Dove Cottage
  • 1985: Towards a Collaboration, Arts Council N.I.
  • 1986: Clearances, Cornamona Press
  • 1988: Readings in Contemporary Poetry, DIA Art Foundation
  • 1988: The Sounds of Rain, Emory University
  • 1989: An Upstairs Outlook, Linen Hall Library
  • 1989: The Place of Writing, Emory University
  • 1990: The Tree Clock, Linen Hall Library
  • 1991: Squarings, Hieroglyph Editions
  • 1992: Dylan the Durable, Bennington College
  • 1992: The Gravel Walks, Lenoir Rhyne College
  • 1992: The Golden Bough, Bonnefant Press
  • 1993: Keeping Going, Bow and Arrow Press
  • 1993: Joy or Night, University of Swansea
  • 1994: Extending the Alphabet, Memorial University of Newfoundland
  • 1994: Speranza in Reading, University of Tasmania
  • 1995: Oscar Wilde Dedication, Westminster Abbey
  • 1995: Charles Montgomery Monteith, All Souls College
  • 1995: Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, Gallery Press
  • 1997: Poet to Blacksmith, Pim Witteveen
  • 1998: Commencement Address, UNC Chapel Hill
  • 1998: Audenesque, Maeght
  • 1999: The Light of the Leaves, Bonnefant Press
  • 2001: Something to Write Home About, Flying Fox
  • 2002: Hope and History, Rhodes University
  • 2002: Ecologues in Extremis, Royal Irish Academy
  • 2002: A Keen for the Coins, Lenoir Rhyne College
  • 2003: Squarings, Arion Press
  • 2004: Anything can Happen, Town House Publishers
  • 2005: The Door Stands Open, Irish Writers Centre
  • 2005: A Shiver, Clutag Press
  • 2007: The Riverbank Field, Gallery Press
  • 2008: Articulations, Royal Irish Academy
  • 2008: One on a Side, Robert Frost Foundation

About Heaney and his work

Discography

See also

References

  1. ^ "April 13, 2009". readwritethink.org. 2009-04-13. http://www.readwritethink.org/CALENDAR/calendar_day.asp?id=707. Retrieved on 2009-03-17. "Seamus Heaney was born in Ireland on April 14, 1939." 
  2. ^ Heaney, Seamus (1998). Opened Ground. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ISBN 0374526788. 
  3. ^ "A Note on Seamus Heaney". inform.orbitaltec.ne. http://inform.orbitaltec.net/heaney/. Retrieved on 2009-04-20. "Seamus Heaney was born on April 13th, 1939, the first child of Patrick and Margaret Kathleen Heaney (nee McCann), who then lived on a fifty-acre farm called Mossbawn, in the townland of Tamniarn, County Derry, Northern Ireland." 
  4. ^ Heaney, Seamus : Mid-Term Break
  5. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6279053.stm
  6. ^ http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/10.02/11-heaney.html
  7. ^ "Play Listing". Irish Playography. Irish Theatre Institute. http://www.irishplayography.com/search/play.asp?play_id=617. Retrieved on 2007-08-24. 
  8. ^ Beowulf: A New Translation
  9. ^ Rhodes Department of English Annual Report 2002-2003
  10. ^ Website
  11. ^ Press Release
  12. ^ Eminem - The Way I Am, autobiography, cover sheet
  13. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3033614.stm
  14. ^ Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, 16 January 2007.
  15. ^ BBC News "Heaney wins TS Eliot poetry prize", 15 January 2007.
  16. ^ BBC News Magazine "Faces of the week", 19 January 2007.

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Nobel Laureates in Literature

Saul Bellow (1976) · Vicente Aleixandre (1977) · Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) · Odysseas Elytis (1979) · Czesław Miłosz (1980) · Elias Canetti (1981) · Gabriel García Márquez (1982) · William Golding (1983) · Jaroslav Seifert (1984) · Claude Simon (1985) · Wole Soyinka (1986) · Joseph Brodsky (1987) · Naguib Mahfouz (1988) · Camilo José Cela (1989) · Octavio Paz (1990) · Nadine Gordimer (1991) · Derek Walcott (1992) · Toni Morrison (1993) · Kenzaburo Oe (1994) · Seamus Heaney (1995) · Wisława Szymborska (1996) · Dario Fo (1997) · José Saramago (1998) · Günter Grass (1999) · Gao Xingjian (2000)
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