Seamus Heaney(1939-2013)

• 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)

• The poem exposes the hatred and the violence of the Troubles in all

their cruelty.

• The last three lines are an epitaph:

That WednesdayEverybody heldHis breath and trembled.

The death of a man is registered as just

another casualty.

The Troubles