Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet born in 1939 in Northern Ireland. He drew inspiration from rural life and the natural world of his childhood. His works explored the conflict in Northern Ireland and sought to understand rather than condemn those involved. Heaney believed the poet's task was to examine the historical and psychological roots of violence. He used traditional forms and drew from Anglo-Saxon poetry to craft elegant, precise works that gave universal meaning to personal and political themes.

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

2. 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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3. 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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4. 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
Seamus Heaney
after the irruption into Northern
affairs of the Provisional IRA.
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5. 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
Seamus Heaney
prose pieces).
1984  Station Island.
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6. 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.
Seamus Heaney
1996  The Spirit Level.
2001  Electric Light.
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7. 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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8. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. 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 Seamus Heaney
us.
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14. 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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