seamus heaney (1939-2013). born in a roman catholic family in ulster he lived on a farm on the...
TRANSCRIPT
• Born in a Roman Catholic Family in Ulster
• He lived on a farm on the border with the Irish Republic
• He went to Queen’s University in Protestant Belfast
• In 1972 he settled in the Irish Republic
• Since 1976 he has lived and taught in Dublin
• In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature
His Life
• Death of a Naturalist (1966)
• Door into the Dark (1969)
Heaney describes the Irish landscape of his youth.
He describes the relationship of language, place and
race in Ireland.
Digging (1966)
Early Collections
• Wintering Out (1972)
• North (1975)
• Field Work (1979)
• Station Island (1984)
• Seeing Things (1991)
• The Spirit Level (1996)
• Electric Light (2001)
• District and Circle (2006)
• Human Chain (2010)
He continues to explore history and place, but also language,
as a living entity.
Later Collections
• Like all Irish writers he has to come to terms with the English
language.
• Words have an energy which must be liberated.
• His language is rich and simple.
• It also exploits rhythmical and phonetic possibilities.
Heaney’s Language
• The poet’s pen is resting between his fingersBetween my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests
• The sound of the poet’s father digging in the garden takes the poet
back some twenty years Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:My father, digging […]
Just like his old man.
Digging (1966)
• The movements, sounds, smells of the past come alive for the poet.
• He has no spade only his pen.
He will dig with thatBetween my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I’ll dig with it.
The pen has become a link with the poet’s racial and cultural
heritage it unites the past and present.
Past and Present
• The poem’s description of the man makes a typical Irishman come
wonderfully alive:
different ways of calling for rum or beer at the pub;
his mannerisms;
his rituals with his pipe and tobacco.
• The language is full of compressed colloquial or everyday phrases:
a quick stouta discreet dumb-showpulling off the topa tobacco plug
Casualty (1972)