On Seamus Heaney
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A vivid and original account of one of Ireland’s greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer
The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland.
Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney’s work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney’s evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney’s cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers.
Combining a vivid account of Heaney’s life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Foster (Vivid Faces), a Queen Mary University professor of Irish history and literature, delivers a succinct but insightful critical biography that puts the poetry of Seamus Heaney (1939 2013) firmly in the context of his life and times. Often referring back to the original drafts of Heaney's work and correspondence to follow his artistic evolution, Foster traces the arc of Heaney's career, from his early days in his native Northern Ireland as a childhood literary prodigy in Derry and then as part of a circle of talented young Belfast writers to his emergence onto a wider international stage. Though Foster's admiration for Heaney is obvious, he gives a balanced account of how Heaney's writing has been received, registering criticisms that Heaney's poems, particularly in his seminal 1975 collection, North, refuse to take an explicit stance on the Troubles' sectarian violence. Foster also shows that Heaney's most significant early poetic influences William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins were English, and that Heaney, in his own words, aimed "to take the English lyric and make it eat stuff that it has never eaten before... like all the messy and, it would seem, incomprehensible obsessions in the North ." This reflective and incisive study works both as an academic research aid and as an accessible primer for general poetry readers.
