Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world's great poets. Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times. With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes. Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.

Seamus Heaney is the foremost Irish poet since Yeats and one of the most popular poets writing in English today. The poetry and criticism of the Nobel Prize Winner are of indisputable importance to contemporary literature, his influence growing with each new work. This fourth edition of The Art of Seamus Heaney is the latest in a series of ongoing critical responses to Heaney's work. It adds new essays on Heaney's most recent books by critics, Tim Kendall, John Goodby and Helen Phillips, to those by Helen Vendler, Douglas Dunn, Edna Longley, Anne Stevenson, Bernard O'Donoghue, Philip Hobsbaum and Ciaran Carson among others. The book also features the facsimiles of the drafts of 'North' - one of Heaney's most important early poems - which allow the reader to follow its development. Tony Curtis is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan where he directs an MPhil in Writing. He has published 26 books, including nine poetry collections such as Heaven's Gate (2001). A selection of his poetry has recently been translated and published in Armenia. He is also the editor of several anthologies including After the First Death, a volume of war writing (2007).

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.

Selected poems from a Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney had the idea to make a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, a collection small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, but now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. No other selection of Heaney’s poems exists that has such a broad range, drawing from the first to the last of his prizewinning collections. In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, and will discover new favorites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching far and wide, for now and for years to come.

The title poem of this collection, set on an Irish island, tells of a pilgrim on an inner journey that leads him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called the narrative sequence in Seamus Heaney's Station Island "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years."

Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field Work he "brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world" (Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).

Seamus Heaney, widely considered the most gifted living poet in Ireland and Britain, is the first Irish poet since Yeats to gain an international reputation. In this remarkable study, henry Hart discusses Heaney's poems, his creative and personal situations, and his assimilation of contemporary literary theory. From Heaney's Ulster background to poetic influences as diverse as Dante and Wordsworth, Yeats and Bly, Hart offers sophisticated, lucid insights. Hart argues that the best way into Heaney's poetic world is in seeking to understand him—as with Blake and Yeats—in terms of oppositions and conflicts, progressions and syntheses. At the root of all his work is a multifaceted argument with himself, with others, with sectarian Northern Ireland, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, with his Roman Catholicism, and with his Nationalist upbringing on a farm in County Derry. For each volume of poems, from Door into the Dark to The Haw Lantern, Hart identifies and works with a specific problem in the text, while developing its intellectual and creative implications. He covers aspects as diverse as Heaney's incorporation of antipastoral attitudes in his poems, his fascination with how etymology recapitulates ancient and modern history, and apocalypticism in North. Placing his trust in art's ability to confront conflicts between freedom and responsibility, between private craft and public involvement, Heaney is shown nonetheless to chastise himself for failing to have a greater impact on the situation he left behind in Northern Ireland. In pursuing the literary, religious, and political themes in his books of poetry, Hart shows that Heaney is no provincial bard, as some critics have suggested, but is as intellectually informed and astute as any postmodernist writer. Any reader of Seamus Heaney's poetry, and any poet, poetry scholar, critic of contemporary poetry, or student of Irish literature will gain much from reading this book.