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Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=215

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Seamus Heaney including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/literature/1995a.html

This link connects you to the Nobel Prize Internet Archive on Heaney with links to Heaney's biography, poetry, and Nobel lecture.

BIOGRAPHY

Seamus Heaney shares the distinction of being the only Irish poet besides W. B. Yeats to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born and raised north of Belfast in Mossbawn, County Derry, he attended Queen's College from 1957-1961 and then went on to receive a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College, Belfast where he became a lecturer while pursuing literary collaboration with such poets as Philip Hobsbaum, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley. Four years later, he married Marie Devlin and published Eleven Poems followed the next year by Death of a Naturalist, which brought him much recognition and such prizes as the E. C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, Somerset Maugham Award, and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His next volume Door into the Dark became the Poetry Book Society Choice for 1969. Following a brief appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, Heaney gave up his lectureship at Queens College and took up residence in Glanmore, County Wicklow. During the 1970s, Heaney alternated giving poetry readings with a teaching position at Carysfort, publishing North (1975) and Field Work (1979) which presented the rural settings of his earlier volumes through a deeper attention to Irish history and politics. With his publication of Station Island in 1984, Heaney also was elected to the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, followed in 1989 by his becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. His recent volumes include Seeing Things (1991) and The Spirit Level (1996).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Allen, Michael, Ed. Seamus Heaney. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997/

Foster, John Wilson. The Achievement of Seamus Heaney. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1995.

Garratt, Robert F, Ed. Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney. London: Prentice Hall International, 1995.

Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, Ed. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000.

Molloy, Catharine and Phyllis Carey, Eds. Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

Murphy, Andrew. Seamus Heaney. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House and the British Council, 2000.

Tobin, Daniel. Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. Seamus Heaney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER