The Irish voice of the earth

1. The Irish voice of the earth Seamus Heaney 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 culturaldivision of Ulster. • Graduated in English Language and Literature in Belfast in 1961. Seamus Heaney Only Connect ... New Directions

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 Only Connect ... New Directions

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 after the irruption into Northern affairs of the Provisional IRA. Seamus Heaney Only Connect ... New Directions

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 prose pieces). 1984Station Island. Seamus Heaney Only Connect ... New Directions

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. 1996The Spirit Level. 2001Electric Light. Seamus Heaney Only Connect ... New Directions

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 Only Connect ... New Directions

8. Seamus Heaney 3. The voice of the earth • The interchange between man and natureenlarges the poet’s consciousness. • The poet is intimately involved with his own community, the inheritor of rural traditions of labour and service. Ardmore, Ireland Only Connect ... New Directions

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 nationalistsin Northern Ireland. French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass. Only Connect ... New Directions

10. Seamus Heaney 4. Heaney and politics Poetry is split between aneed for creative freedom and a pressure to express the sense of social obligationfelt by the poet as a citizen. French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass. Only Connect ... New Directions

11. Seamus Heaney 5. The poet’s task The poet’s task is not to condemn, but to draw backand examine the historical reasons and psychological consequencesbehind them. this gives his work universal meaningand almost mythic resonance. Only Connect ... New Directions

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 dispossessedand maltreated, and act as exemplars of sufferingand endurance. Only Connect ... New Directions

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 us. Seamus Heaney Only Connect ... New Directions

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 stressesto 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 Only Connect ... New Directions