Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry

Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry PDF Author: Bernard O'Donoghue
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138458451
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Dedication -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: 'An art that knows its mind' -- 1 English or Irish Lyric? (1960s Heaney) -- 2 Phonetics and Feeling: Wintering Out, North and Field Work (1970s Heaney) -- 3 'The limbo of lost words': The Sweeney Complex -- 4 Beyond the Alphabet: The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things -- 5 Heaney's ars poetica: Mandelstam, Dante and The Government of the Tongue -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry

Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry PDF Author: Bernard O'Donoghue
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138458451
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Dedication -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: 'An art that knows its mind' -- 1 English or Irish Lyric? (1960s Heaney) -- 2 Phonetics and Feeling: Wintering Out, North and Field Work (1970s Heaney) -- 3 'The limbo of lost words': The Sweeney Complex -- 4 Beyond the Alphabet: The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things -- 5 Heaney's ars poetica: Mandelstam, Dante and The Government of the Tongue -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry

Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry PDF Author: Bernard O'Donoghue
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN: 9780133207637
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Seamus Heaney is one of the most popular Irish poets writing today, and although his critics have recognized the centrality of the language of his poetry and his pronouncements on language, these aspects of his work have received little concentrated critical attention. Berhnard O'Donoghue, himself a poet, works chronologically through Heaney's poetry -- focusing on Heaney's writing on the appropriate language of poetry and his theory of poetry and the writer's responsibility to art and politics. Covers topics such as English or Irish lyric: 60s Heaney. Phonetics and feeling: from "Wintering Out" to "Field Work." The limbo of lost worlds: the Sweeney complex. Beyond the alphabet: "The Haw Lantern; Seeing Things." Heaney's 'Ars Poetica'; "Dante" and "The Government of the Tongue." For those interested in modern and contemporary poetry, and Irish literature.

Seamus Heaney and the Language Of Poetry

Seamus Heaney and the Language Of Poetry PDF Author: Bernard O'Donoghue
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315504871
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This book scrutinizes Heaney's language in order to examine his theory of poetry and the writer's responsibility to art and politics. The author, himself a poet, works chronologically through the poetry and discusses it in light of Heaney's writings on the appropriate language of poetry. Chapters also look at Heaney's language and at the government of the tongue.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674002050
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world's great poets. Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times. With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes. Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.

100 Poems

100 Poems PDF Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720118
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Selected poems from a Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney had the idea to make a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, a collection small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, but now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. No other selection of Heaney’s poems exists that has such a broad range, drawing from the first to the last of his prizewinning collections. In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, and will discover new favorites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching far and wide, for now and for years to come.

The Life of Words

The Life of Words PDF Author: David-Antoine Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198812477
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original 'true meaning' asserted in the etymology of 'etymology' declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was 'arbitrary', or 'unmotivated', a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our 'Age of the Arbitrary', whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of 'fallacy' or 'true meaning'. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, and J. H. Prynne.

District and Circle

District and Circle PDF Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466855495
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II – railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence" of "Cattle out in rain" – are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present – a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety. But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems which "do the rounds of the district" – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals. District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

The Letters of Seamus Heaney

The Letters of Seamus Heaney PDF Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720061
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
The letters provide us with an intimate, multilayered understanding of this extraordinary poet’s life and mind. Every now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two. In this astute selection from Seamus Heaney’s vast correspondence, we are given direct access to the life and poetic development of a literary titan, from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the years of international eminence that kept him heroically busy until his death. Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this remarkable story in the poet’s own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic, and deeply thoughtful, The Letters of Seamus Heaney encompasses decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. Heaney’s mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writings; listening to his voice we find ourselves in the same room as a man whose presence enriched the world and whose legacy deepens our sense of what truly matters.

Human Chain

Human Chain PDF Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466855673
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present—the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 101" plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.

The Spirit Level

The Spirit Level PDF Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466855746
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
In The Spirit Level, as ever with Seamus Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects -- a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing -- are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert, and completely truthful.