Seamus Heaney died in 2013, at the age of seventy-four. In 1966 he published his first book of poems, Death of a Naturalist. This brilliant first book was followed, over the next 48 years by thirteen more books of poems, two translations of plays by Sophocles, a modern Anglo-Irish translation of the Old English epic Beowulf, five collections of essays, and a major book of interview-autobiography.
Heaney was the Boylston Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for many years, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1990, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
Heaney was also—perhaps most importantly, for poetry, for himself, and for us—a great and good man, unassuming, understanding, open-minded, thoughtful, and kind.
History will say that there were three great poets writing in English in the twentieth century: Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, and Seamus Heaney.
Heaney was also a great and important essayist. We will read and study about thirty short Heaney poems this term, and several of his essays about poetry and about Ireland and about human existence.
Our text for the course will be Opened Ground, Poems 1996-1996, and a selection of essays.
Requirements for the course will be serious reading and thinking, class participation, weekly in-class “scribbles,” and a seminar paper on a small selection of Heaney's poems. The amount of reading you have for this course will be small; but I will expect you to understand well what you have read, and to learn to read the poems aloud well. Remember: poetry happens in the mind and in the mouth, and—as John Keats said—it must be “felt along the pulses.”
Two sticks upright “Are your praties dry
and one across. and is they fit for diggin?”
That's the sign “Put in your spade and try,”
of Barney Ross. Said dirty-faced McGuigan.
--Bert Hornback |
