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On Seamus Heaney - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

On Seamus Heaney

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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Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney’s work.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.

ISBN-13: 9780691174372

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 08-25-2020

Pages: 248

Product Dimensions: 4.50(w) x 7.40(h) x 1.10(d)

Series: Writers on Writers #11

R. F. Foster is Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University of London and Emeritus Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford. His many books include Modern Ireland: 1600–1972, the two-volume W. B. Yeats: A Life, and, most recently, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923. Foster’s writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Review of Books, the Irish Times, and many other publications. He lives in London.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Roy Foster, in this perceptive and astute book, concentrates on the development of Seamus Heaney as a poet. He writes with care about the political and personal background, but the book's great achievement is Foster's sympathetic and intelligent analysis of the poems themselves and the imagination that created them."—Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce

“A remarkably achieved yet compact reading of Seamus Heaney’s work, this is a wonderfully sustained, elegantly structured interpretation of a great poet. Readers will appreciate the sensitivity of the analyses and the way they are integrated into a deftly constructed narrative of Heaney’s career.”—Nicholas Grene, Trinity College, Dublin

“A brief, sharp, and wonderfully detailed account of Seamus Heaney, one of the most important poets of the past hundred years. R. F. Foster is both a distinguished historian of Ireland and an astute and subtle literary critic. His masterful book brings us close to a writer who far too often is held at a polite, admiring distance.”—Michael Wood, Princeton University

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

1 Certus 1

2 Kinship 30

3 The Same Root 60

4 In the Middle of His Journey 94

5 Alphabetical Order 120

6 The Moment of Mortality 148

7 The Bird on the Roof 176

8 Clearance 198

Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney 207

Index 215