1. The Irish voice of the earth
Seamus Heaney
The Irish voice of the earth
Seamus Heaney

2. Only Connect ... New Directions
Seamus Heaney
1. Life
Born into a Catholic family in 1939 in the county of Derry, Northern Ireland.
At school became aware of the religious and cultural division of Ulster.
Graduated in English Language and Literature in Belfast in 1961.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
1. Life
In 1970 and 1971, Heaney worked at the University of California, Berkeley. This accelerated the “politicisation” of his poetry  poetry could become “a mode of resistance”.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
2. Works
1966  Death of a Naturalist.
1969  Door into the Dark: involvement in the civil rights movement.
1972  Wintering Out: his response to the increasing complexity of the Irish question after the irruption into Northern affairs of the Provisional IRA.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
2. Works
1975  North: the result of Heaney’s meditation on his reading P.V. Glob’s The Bog People and its account of propitiatory Iron Age ritual killings in Jutland.
1980  Selected Poems, Preoccupations (a collection of prose pieces).
1984  Station Island.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
2. Works
1987  The Haw Lantern.
1991  Seeing Things: return to some of the memories of his childhood, especially in the sequence of the sonnets dedicated to his mother’s death.
1996  The Spirit Level.
2001  Electric Light.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
3. The voice of the earth
Rural County Derry is the “country of the mind”.
Emphasis on human work: ploughing and digging, butter-churning, the blackberry and potato picking.
Ardmore, Ireland
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Seamus Heaney
3. The voice of the earth
The interchange between man and nature enlarges the poet’s consciousness.
The poet is intimately involved with his own community, the inheritor of rural traditions of labour and service.
Ardmore, Ireland
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9. Seamus Heaney
4. Heaney and politics
Always present in Heaney’s poetry is the shadow of the violent conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland.
French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass.
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10. Seamus Heaney
4. Heaney and politics
Poetry is split between a need for creative freedom and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as a citizen.
French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass.
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Seamus Heaney
5. The poet’s task
The poet’s task is not to condemn, but to draw back and examine the historical reasons and psychological consequences behind them.
this gives his work universal meaning and almost mythic resonance.
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Seamus Heaney
6. The elegiac Heaney
The poems evoke figures who suffer some kind of human diminishment: isolation, repression, disenchantment, exploitation or betrayal.
They stand for those historically dispossessed and maltreated, and act as exemplars of suffering and endurance.
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Seamus Heaney
7. Death and memory
The recognition of death is an absolute necessity for a poet, because it is only then that the writer's soul can open up to what the wider universe has to say, what matters in this life, and what our forefathers can teach us.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
8. Style
Presence of a speaker viewing the story from his own particular place and time.
A quatrain form where there is:
the dissolving of line into line and image into image
the use of enjambement
two stresses to a line, like the half-line of Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre
use of the colon or its equivalent, the dash
imitation of Anglo-Saxon kennings
precision of technical terms
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