"The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances"

Author: Eugene O'Brien

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0268100233

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The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances brings together sixteen of the most prominent scholars who have written on Seamus Heaney to examine the Nobel Prize winner’s later poetry from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to Heaney’s early and middle poems—the Bog Poems in particular—this book focuses on the poetry collected in Heaney's Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010) as a thematically connected set of writings. The starting point of the essays in this collection is that these later poems can be grouped in terms of style, theme, approach, and intertextuality. They develop themes that were apparent in Heaney’s earlier work, but they also break with these themes and address issues that are radically different from those of the earlier collections. The essays are divided into five sections, focusing on ideas of death, the later style, translation and transnational poetics, luminous things and gifts, and usual and unusual spaces. A number of the contributors see Heaney as stressing the literary over the actual and as always looking at the interstices and positions of liminality and complexity. His use of literary references in his later poetry exemplifies his search for literary avatars against whom he can test his own ideas and with whom he can enter into an aesthetic and ethical dialogue. The essayists cover a great deal of Heaney’s debts to classical and modern literature—in the original languages and in translations—and demonstrate the degree to which the streets on which Heaney walked and wrote were two-way: he was influenced by Virgil, Petrarch, Milosz, Wordsworth, Keats, Rilke, and others and, in turn, had an impact on contemporary poets. This remarkable collection will appeal to scholars and literary critics, undergraduates as well as graduate students, and to the many general readers of Heaney's poetry.

"The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances"

Author: Eugene O'Brien

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780268100209

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Sixteen scholars examine Seamus Heaney's lesser known later poetry, from 1990 onward, pointing out continuity with and new themes from his earlier works.

The Cure at Troy
The Cure at Troy

Author: Seamus Heaney

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-01-28

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1466864052

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The Cure at Troy is Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. Written in the fifth century BC, this play concerns the predicament of the outcast hero, Philoctetes, whom the Greeks marooned on the island of Lemnos and forgot about until the closing stages of the Siege of Troy. Abandoned because of a wounded foot, Philoctetes nevertheless possesses an invincible bow without which the Greeks cannot win the Trojan War. They are forced to return to Lemnos and seek out Philoctetes' support in a drama that explores the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency. Heaney's version of Philoctetes is a fast-paced, brilliant work ideally suited to the stage. Heaney holds on to the majesty of the Greek original, but manages to give his verse the flavor of Irish speech and context.

Haunted Heaney
Haunted Heaney

Author: Ian Hickey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 100041681X

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Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry looks at the ghosts and spectres present within the poetry of the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Covering Heaney’s work from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, to his final collection, Human Chain, this volume analyses Heaney’s poetry through the lens of hauntology as presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. This book presents spectres and ghosts not in the conventional sense, as purely supernatural, physical manifestations haunting a place, but instead as having a non-physical presence. In this sense past cultures, societies, texts, poets, and memories are examined as having a spectral influence on Heaney’s writing. His work is indebted to hauntedness as the past in all its forms sutures itself within the present of his thinking and writing, and our reading of the poetry. Topics for discussion include the Norse spectres in the early poetry; British colonialism and its haunting influence on the poet; a renewed look at the bog poems as being influenced by the spectral; the classical influence of Virgil and Dante; and a reading of ‘Route 110’ that incorporates the major instances of Heaney’s career into a singular poem. The book also incorporates Heaney’s prose work and interviews into the discussion and uses these works as a metacommentary to the poetry offering a deeper insight into the mind of one of Ireland’s greatest writers.

Seamus Heaney and Society
Seamus Heaney and Society

Author: Rosie Lavan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-22

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0192555820

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Throughout his career in poetry, Seamus Heaney maintained roles in education and was a visible presence in the print and broadcast media. Seamus Heaney and Society presents a dynamic new engagement with one of the most celebrated poets of the modern period, examining the ways in which his work as a poet was shaped by his work as a teacher, lecturer, critic, and public figure. Drawing on a range of archival material, this book revives the varied contexts within which Heaney's work was written, published, and circulated. Mindful of the different spheres which surrounded his pursuit of poetry, it assesses his achievements and status in Ireland, Britain, and the United States through close analysis of his work in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, and manuscript drafts of key writings now held in the National Library of Ireland. Asserting the significance of the cultural, institutional, and historical worlds in which Heaney wrote and was read, Seamus Heaney and Society offers a timely reconstruction of the social lives of his work, while also exploring the ways in which he questioned and sustained the privacy and singularity of poetry. Ultimately, it considers how the enduring legacy of a great poet emerges from the working life of a contemporary writer.

Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work
Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work

Author: Joanne Piavanini

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-06-17

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 3030469271

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Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work considers the ways that memory functions in Heaney’s poetry. Joanne Piavanini argues that the shaping of collective memory is one of Heaney’s major contributions as a poet. Locating Heaney in a transnational literary sphere, this book argues that his late work isdefined by a type of cosmopolitanism openness: the work moves beyond national identity to explore multiple allegiances and identifications. Moreover, Piavanini demonstrates that memory is a helpful lens to look at Heaney’s late work, in particular, because of the interplay of past, present and future in these works: in the construction of a collective memory of the Troubles; in the use of the elegy to commemorate the passing of important contemporary poets; in his writing on events with transnational significance, such as 9/11; in the slippages between past and present in poems about his family; and through the literary afterlives of texts—specifically, his appropriation of canonical classical texts. Drawing on approaches and concepts from memory studies, Piavanini considers Heaney’s late work to develop an analysis of poetry as a vehicle of memory.

Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking
Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking

Author: Ian Hickey

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1000867358

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Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking examines Seamus Heaney’s poetic engagement with myth from his earliest work to the posthumous publication of Aeneid Book VI. The essays explore the ways in which Heaney creates his own mythic outlook through multiple mythic lenses. They reveal how Heaney adopts a demiurgic role throughout his career, creating a poetic universe that draws on diverse mythic cycles from Greco-Roman to Irish and Norse to Native American. In doing so, this collection is in dialogue with recent work on Heaney’s engagement with myth. However, it is unique in its wide-ranging perspective, extending beyond Ancient and Classical influences. In its focus on Heaney’s personal metamorphosis of several mythic cycles, this collection reveals more fully the poet’s unique approach to mythmaking, from his engagement with the act of translation to transnational influences on his work and from his poetic transformations to the poetry’s boundary-crossing transitions. Combining the work of established Heaney scholars with the perspectives of early-career researchers, this collection contains a wealth of original scholarship that reveals Heaney’s expansive mythic mind. Mythmaking, an act for which Heaney has faced severe criticism, is reconsidered by all contributors, prompting multifaceted and nuanced readings of the poet’s work.

The Modern Irish Sonnet
The Modern Irish Sonnet

Author: Tara Guissin-Stubbs

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-10

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 3030532429

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The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry, and shows how the Irish sonnet has become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion. The text reshapes the poetic and critical field, exploring canonical and non-canonical poems by male and female poets so as to challenge outmoded views of the thematic and formal limitations of the sonnet.

The Art of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry
The Art of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry

Author: Edward T. Duffy

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-13

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1003853714

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The Art of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry is a critical study of the poet's later work. While exploring his practice as a translator, it also traces his increasing preoccupation with the possibilities and conditions of translation in the theological sense of being lifted up in spirit. To the work of this philosophical poet, who would be both “earthed and heady” this book brings the insights of ordinary language philosophy as practiced by Stanley Cavell. It devotes separate chapters to Station Island and three later collections: Seeing Things, Electric Light and Human Chain. The first of these addresses the most fundamental change in Heaney’s life when he acknowledges the “need and chance to re-envisage” his Irish-Catholic upbringing; it is also replete with both the activity and the trope of translation. Published seven years later, Seeing Things begins with a translation of Virgil’s golden bough episode and ends with a similar crossing over into the underworld by Dante. Heaney transforms both into poems about poetry. In Electric Light, Heaney returns to Virgil, but now he concentrates not on the hero of the Aeneid but on Virgil's earlier efforts in pastoral, a mode of writing that Heaney takes as a model for his own time and place of “devastated order.” Heaney returns to the Aeneid in Human Chain, but this time around he gives all his attention to the scene of the human souls in Elysium seeking rebirth and turns it into an image for the need and chance of pronouncing “a final Yes” to our world and our place in it.

Seamus Heaney's Gifts
Seamus Heaney's Gifts

Author: Henry Hart

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2024-12-13

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 080718344X

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“The fact of the matter,” Seamus Heaney said in a 1997 interview with the Paris Review, “is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry.” Throughout his career, Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, maintained that poetry came to him from a mysterious source like a gift of grace. He also believed that the recipient of this sort of boon had an ethical obligation to share it with others. Seamus Heaney’s Gifts, by the noted scholar and poet Henry Hart, offers the first comprehensive examination of Heaney’s preoccupation with gifts and gift-exchange. Drawing on extensive research in Heaney’s papers, as well as three decades of correspondence with the poet, Hart presents a richly detailed study of Heaney’s life and work that foregrounds the Irishman’s commitment to the vocation of poetry as a public art to be shared with audiences and readers around the world. Heaney traced his devotion to gifts back to the actual present of a Conway Stewart fountain pen that his parents gave him at the age of twelve when he left his family farm in Northern Ireland to attend a private Catholic secondary school in Londonderry. He commemorated this gift in “Digging,” the first poem in his first book, and in two poems he wrote near the end of his life: “The Conway Stewart” and “On the Gift of a Fountain Pen.” Friends and doctors had warned him that his endless globetrotting to give lectures and poetry readings had damaged his health. Yet he felt obligated to share his talent with audiences around the world until his death in 2013. As Hart shows, Heaney found his first models for gift-giving in his rural community in Northern Ireland, the Bible, the rituals of the Catholic Church, and the literature of mystical and mythical quests. Blending careful research with evocative commentaries on the poet’s work, Seamus Heaney’s Gifts explains his ideas about the artist’s gift, the necessity of gift-exchange acts, and the moral responsibility to share one’s talents for the benefit of others.