Who is seamus heaney as a poet

Not only was his mastery of language confirmed, so was his Irishness. He continued publishing translations and writing anthologies of his own work. And, as he settled into feeling secure in his abilities and finances, he wrote about happiness. He imagined himself as a boat, sailing through the air. He was connected to the land, to his family and friends, and despite the angst we sometimes equate with poets, he wrote about happiness. It is about going for it.

At St. The first verses he wrote when he was a young teacher in Belfast in the early s and many of the best known poems in North , his important volume published in , are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-Saxon note in English. Station Island reveals Dante, for example, as a crucial influence, and echoes of Virgil — as well as a translation from Book VI of The Aeneid — are to be found in Seeing Things Although Heaney is stylistically and temperamentally different from such writers as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon his contemporaries , and Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson members of a younger Northern Irish generation , he does share with all of them the fate of having be en born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust.

Here, he was also associated with the poets Seamus Deane and Tom Paulin, and the singer David Hammond in a project which sought to bring the artistic and intellectual focus of its members into productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing in Irish political life. A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and Seamus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a teacher training college, where he functioned as Head of the English Department until , when his present arrangement with Harvard University came into existence.

But the Irish Rebellion of does not loom so large in the consciousness — outside of Ireland, certainly. Tollund Man, the mummified corpse of a man who lived during the fourth century BC, had been found in a peat bog in Scandinavia in Next time you drink a slog of sloe gin, remember this poem. It also features in our pick of the best sestinas in English. He uses the childhood memory of gazing into wells in order to see his reflection and hear his voice echoed back to him, returning something dark and different from what is familiar.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Image: Seamus Heaney in the studio with his portrait by Colin Davidson.

Painted in Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. Seamus Heaney — Seamus Heaney passed away in Dublin, Ireland, on August 30, He was seventy-four.

Photo credit: Giovanni Giovannetti.