Heaney, Seamus (Justin) 1939-

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HEANEY, Seamus (Justin) 1939-

PERSONAL: Born April 13, 1939, in County Derry, Northern Ireland; son of Patrick (a farmer) and Margaret Heaney; married Marie Devlin, 1965; children: Michael, Christopher, Catherine. Education: Attended St. Columb's College, Derry; Queen's University, Belfast, B.A. (first class honors), 1961, St. Joseph's College of Education, teacher's certificate, 1962.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—19 Strand Rd., Dublin 4, Ireland.

CAREER: Poet, translator, educator, and critic. Worked as secondary school teacher in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1962-63; St. Joseph's College of Education, Belfast, lecturer, 1963-66; Queen's University, Belfast, lecturer in English, 1966-72; freelance writer, 1972-75; Carysfort College, Dublin, Ireland, lecturer, 1976-82; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, visiting lecturer, 1979, visiting professor, 1982-86, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, 1986-96; Oxford University, Oxford, England, professor of poetry, 1990-94. Visiting lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1970-71. Has given numerous lectures and poetry readings at universities in England, Ireland, and the United States.

MEMBER: Irish Academy of Letters (Aosdana), Royal Dublin Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters (honorary foreign member), American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

AWARDS, HONORS: Eric Gregory Award, 1966, Cholmondeley Award, 1967, Somerset Maugham Award, 1968, and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1968, all for Death of a Naturalist; Poetry Book Society Choice citation, 1969, for Door into the Dark; Irish Academy of Letters award, 1971; writer-in-residence award, American Irish Foundation, and Denis Devlin Award, both 1973, both for Wintering Out; E. M. Forster Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1975; W. H. Smith Award, Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, and Poetry Book Society Choice citation, all 1976, all for North; Bennett Award, Hudson Review, 1982; D.H.L., Fordham University and Queen's University, Belfast, both 1982, Harvard University, 1998, University of Wales, 1999, University of Birmingham, 2000, Rhodes University, South Africa and University of East Anglia, 2002, and University of Dundee and University of London, 2003; Los Angeles Times Book Prize nomination, 1984, and PEN Translation Prize for Poetry, 1985, both for Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish; Whitbread Award, 1987, for The Haw Lantern, and 1997, for The Spirit Level; Lannam Foundation award, 1990; Premio Mondello (Palermo, Sicily), 1993; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1995; St. Louis Literary Award, 1998; Irish Times Award, 1999, for Opened Ground; Whitbread Award for poetry and book of the year, 1999, for Beowulf; Wilfred Owen Award for poetry, 2000; short-listed for T. S. Eliot Prize, 2001, for Electric Light; Truman Capote Award for literary criticism, 2003, for Finders Keepers; made Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, French Ministry of Culture.

WRITINGS:

poetry collections

Death of a Naturalist, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1966.

Door into the Dark, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1969.

Wintering Out, Faber (London), 1972, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.

North, Faber, 1975, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1976.

Field Work, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1979.

Poems: 1965-1975, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1980.

(Adapter) Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1984, revised edition, with photographs by Rachel Giese, published as Sweeney's Flight, 1992.

Station Island, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1984.

The Haw Lantern, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1987.

New and Selected Poems, 1969-1987, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1990, revised edition published as Selected Poems, 1966-1987, 1991.

Seeing Things: Poems, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1991.

The Midnight Verdict, Gallery Books (Old Castle, County Meath, Ireland), 1993.

The Spirit Level, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1996.

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1998.

Electric Light, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to 101 Poems Against War, edited by Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2003.

poetry chapbooks

Eleven Poems, Festival Publications (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1965.

(With David Hammond and Michael Longley) Room to Rhyme, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1968.

A Lough Neagh Sequence, edited by Harry Chambers and Eric J. Morten, Phoenix Pamphlets Poets Press (Manchester, England), 1969.

Boy Driving His Father to Confession, Sceptre Press (Surrey, England), 1970.

Night Drive: Poems, Richard Gilbertson (Devon, England), 1970.

Land, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971.

Servant Boy, Red Hanrahan Press (Detroit, MI), 1971.

Stations, Ulsterman Publications (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1975.

Bog Poems, Rainbow Press (London, England), 1975.

(With Derek Mahon) In Their Element, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1977.

After Summer, Deerfield Press, 1978.

Hedge School: Sonnets from Glanmore, Charles Seluzicki (Portland,OR), 1979.
Sweeney Praises the Trees, [New York, NY], 1981.

prose

The Fire i' the Flint: Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1975.

Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address and Elegy, Faber (London, England), 1978.

Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1980.

The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978-1987, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1988.

The Place of Writing, Scholars Press, 1989.

The Redress of Poetry, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1995.

Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1996.

Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2002.

editor

(With Alan Brownjohn) New Poems: 1970-1971, Hutchinson (London, England), 1971.

Soundings: An Annual Anthology of New Irish Poetry, Blackstaff Press (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1972.

Soundings II, Blackstaff Press (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1974.

(With Ted Hughes) The Rattle Bag: An Anthology ofPoetry (juvenile), Faber (London, England), 1982.

The Essential Wordsworth, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1988.

(With Ted Hughes) The School Bag, Faber (London, England), 1997.

Yeats, ("Poet to Poet series"), Faber (London, England), 2000.

Also editor of The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Poetry, 1993.

other

(With John Montague) The Northern Muse (sound recording), Claddagh Records, 1969.

The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' "Philoctetes" (drama; produced by Yale Repertory Theater, 1997, produced in Oxford, England, 1999), Farrar, Straus, 1991.

(Translator, with Stanislaw Baranczak) Laments, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1995.

(With Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) Homage toFrost, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1996.

(Translator) Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, Farrar, Straus, 2000.

(Translator) Leos Janacek, Diary of One Who Vanished: A Song Cycle, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2000.

(Author of introduction) Darcy O'Brien, A Way ofLife, Like Any Other, New York Review Books, 2001.

(Translator) Sorley McLean, Hallaig, 2002.

(Translator) The Midnight Verdict (collection), Dufour, 2002.

(Author of introduction) David Thomson, The People of the Sea: A Journey in Search of the Seal Legend, Counterpoint, 2002.

(With Liam O'Flynn) The Poet and the Piper (audio), Claddagh Records, 2003.

(Author of introduction) Thomas Flanagan, There YouAre: Writing on Irish and American Literature and History, edited by Christopher Cahill, New York Review Books, 2003.

(Translator) The Burial at Thebes: A Version ofSophocles' "Antigone," Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to books, including The Writers: A Sense of Ireland, O'Brien Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1979; Canopy: A Work for Voice and Light in Harvard Yard, Harvard University Art Museums, 1997; Healing Power: The Epic Poise—A Celebration of Ted Hughes, edited by Nick Gammage, Faber, 1999; For the Love of Ireland: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers, Ballantine, 2001; 101 Poems against War, edited by Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan, Faber, 2003; and Don't Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words, Picador, 2003. Contributor of poetry and essays to periodicals, including New Statesman, Listener, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, and London Review of Books.

Heaney's papers and letters are collected at Emory University, Atlanta, GA.

ADAPTATIONS: The film Bye-Child, directed by Bernard MacLaverty, is based on a poem by Heaney.

SIDELIGHTS: Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney has been widely recognized as a major poet of the twentieth century. A native of Northern Ireland and son of a cattle farmer, and a man who divides his time between his Dublin home and a teaching position at Harvard University, Heaney has attracted a readership on several continents and has won prestigious literary awards in England, Ireland, and the United States. As Blake Morrison noted in his work Seamus Heaney, the author is "that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with 'the common reader.'" Part of Heaney's popularity stems from his subject matter—modern Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule. Washington Post Book World contributor Marjorie Perloff suggested that Heaney is successful "because of his political position: the Catholic farm boy from County Derry transformed into the sensitive witness to and historian of the Irish troubles, as those troubles have shaped and altered individual lives." New York Review of Books essayist Richard Murphy described Heaney as "the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present." Heaney's poetry was described by Robert Buttel in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography as "manifestly regional and largely rural in subject matter and traditional in structure—a poetry that appears to be a deliberate step back into a premodernist world of William Wordsworth and John Clare and to represent a rejection of most contemporary poetic fashions."

Inevitably, Heaney has been compared with Irish poet William Butler Yeats; in fact, several critics called Heaney the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. However, New York Review of Books contributor Richard Ellmann once wrote: "After the heavily accented melodies of Yeats, and that poet's elegiac celebrations of imaginative glories, Seamus Heaney addresses his readers in a quite different key. He does not overwhelm his subjects; rather he allows them a certain freedom from him, and his sharp conjunctions with them leave their authority and his undiminished." Elizabeth Jennings made a similar observation in the Spectator, calling Heaney "an extremely Irish poet most especially in language, but he is not a poet in the Yeatsian mould; not for him high-mannered seriousness or intentional rhetoric. He is serious, of course, but it is the gravity which grows in his roots, not one which is obtrusive in the finished artefact."

Heaney once described himself in the New York Times Book Review as one of a group of Catholics in Northern Ireland who "emerged from a hidden, a buried life and entered the realm of education." This process began for Heaney at age eleven; that year he left the family farm to study on scholarship at a boarding school in Belfast. Access to the world of English, Irish, and American letters—first at St. Columb's College and then at Queen's University, Belfast—was a pivotal experience for the poet, who was especially moved by artists who created poetry out of their local and native backgrounds—authors such as Ted Hughes, Patrick Kavanagh, and Robert Frost. Recalling his time in Belfast, Heaney once noted: "I learned that my local County Derry [childhood] experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to 'the modern world' was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it." Searching his cultural roots, but also letting his literary education enrich his expression, Heaney began to craft "a poetry concerned with nature, the shocks and discoveries of childhood experience on a farm, the mythos of the locale—in short, a regional poetry," according to Robert Buttel in his book Seamus Heaney.

Heaney's sort of poetry, Buttel continued, was, in the early 1960s, "essentially a counter-poetry, decidedly not fashionable at the time. To write such poetry called for a measure of confidence if not outright defiance." According to Morrison, a "general spirit of reverence toward the past helped Heaney resolve some of his awkwardness about being a writer: he could serve his own community by preserving in literature its customs and crafts, yet simultaneously gain access to a larger community of letters." Indeed, Heaney's earliest poetry collections—Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark—evoke "a hard, mainly rural life with rare exactness," in the words of Parnassus contributor Michael Wood. Using descriptions of rural laborers and their tasks and contemplations of natural phenomena—filtered sometimes through childhood and sometimes through adulthood—Heaney seeks the self by way of the perceived experience, celebrating life force through earthly things. Buttel wrote in Seamus Heaney: "Augmenting the physical authenticity and the clean, decisive art of the best of the early poems, mainly the ones concerned with the impact of the recollected initiatory experiences of childhood and youth, is the human voice that speaks in them. At its most distinctive it is unpretentious, open, modest, and yet poised, aware." Newsweek correspondent Jack Kroll noted that in these first poems, Heaney "makes you see, hear, smell, taste this life, which in his words is not provincial, but parochial; provincialism hints at the minor or the mediocre, but all parishes, rural or urban, are equal as communities of the human spirit."

As a poet from the north of Ireland, Heaney often reflects in his work upon the "Troubles," the often violent political struggles between some Northern Irish Protestants and their British allies and the militant Irish Republican Army and its supporters at home and abroad. The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out and North. While some reviewers criticized Heaney for being an apologist and mythologizer, New York Review of Books correspondent Richard Murphy suggested that his poetry "is seriously attempting to purge our land of a terrible blood-guilt, and inwardly acknowledging our enslavement to a sacrificial myth. I think it may go a long way toward freeing us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and color, not disguising its brutality."

Morrison suggested that the role of political spokesman has never particularly suited Heaney. The author "has written poems directly about the Troubles as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman, someone looked to for comment and guidance," noted Morrison. "Yet he has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role, defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical, and questioning the extent to which poetry, however 'committed,' can influence the course of history." In the New Boston Review, Shaun O'Connell contended that even Heaney's most overtly political poems contain depths that subtly alter their meanings. "Those who see Seamus Heaney as a symbol of hope in a troubled land are not, of course, wrong to do so," O'Connell stated, "though they may be missing much of the undercutting complexities of his poetry, the backwash of ironies which make him as bleak as he is bright." Any claim to see Heaney as nonpolitical, however, is countered by the poet's ongoing involvement as fundraiser, supporter, representative, ally of peace and humanitarian causes and against torture and war.

After moving to Dublin, Heaney undertook the translation and adaptation of the Irish lyric poem Buile Suibhne. The work concerns an ancient king who, cursed by the church, is transformed into a mad birdman and forced to wander in the harsh and inhospitable countryside. Heaney's translation of the epic was published as Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography Buttel contended that the poem "reveals a heartfelt affinity with the dispossessed king who responds with such acute sensitivity, poetic accuracy, and imaginative force to his landscape." New York Times Book Review contributor Brendan Kennelly also deemed the poem "a balanced statement about a tragically unbalanced mind. One feels that this balance, urbanely sustained, is the product of a long, imaginative bond between Mr. Heaney and Sweeney." This bond is extended into Heaney's 1984 volume Station Island, where a series of poems titled "Sweeney Redivivus" take up Sweeney's voice once more. Buttel saw these poems as part of a larger theme in Station Island; namely, "a personal drama of guilt, lost innocence, and lost moral and religious certainty played against the redemptions of love, faith in the integrity of craft and of dedicated individuals, and ties with the universal forces operating in nature and history."

Reviewing The Haw Lantern, Times Literary Supplement reviewer Neil Corcoran felt that the poems included therein "have a very contemporary sense of how writing is elegy to experience." W. S. DiPiero imagined Heaney's intent in the American Scholar: "Whatever the occasion—childhood, farm life, politics and culture in Northern Ireland, other poets past and present—Heaney strikes time and again at the taproot of language, examining its genetic structures, trying to discover how it has served, in all its changes, as a culture bearer, a world to contain imaginations, at once a rhetorical weapon and nutriment of spirit. He writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with received wisdom." Heaney, declared Buttel, remains "in a long tradition of Irish writers who have flourished in the British literary scene, showing the Britons new possibilities for poetry in their mother tongue."

With the publication of Selected Poems, 1966-1987 Heaney marked the beginning of a new direction in his career. Poetry contributor William Logan commented of this new direction, "The younger Heaney wrote like a man possessed by demons, even when those demons were very literary demons; the older Heaney seems to wonder, bemusedly, what sort of demon he has become himself." In Seeing Things Heaney demonstrates even more clearly this shift in perspective. Jefferson Hunter, reviewing the book for the Virginia Quarterly Review, maintained that collection takes a more spiritual, less concrete approach. "Words like 'spirit' and 'pure,' as opposed to words like 'reek' and 'hock,' have never figured largely in Heaney's poetry," Hunter explained. In some poems in Seeing Things these words "create a new distanced perspective and indeed a new mood" in which "'things beyond measure' or 'things in the offing' or 'the longed-for' can sometimes be sensed, if never directly seen." Heaney also creates a direct link between himself and some of his ancient poetic predecessors, Hunter continued. "'The Golden Bough' translates the famous passage of Aeneid VI wherein the Sybil tells the hero what talisman he must carry on his trip to the underworld, while 'The Crossing' translates Dante's and Virgil's confrontation with the angry Charon in Inferno III."

The Spirit Level continues to explore themes of politics, humanism, and nature. "Heaney's latest collection is a moving and human book, one that includes in its composition a plea for hope, for innocence, for balance, and to seek eventually that 'bubble for the spirit level,'" wrote World Literature Today reviewer Sudeep Sen. Donna Seaman remarked in Booklist: "Heaney navigates skillfully from the personal to the universal, from life to death, seeking that precious equilibrium that only poetry can possess."

Regarding Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, New York Times Book Review commentator Edward Mendelson commented that, "With the prospect of decades of work ahead of him, Heaney has assembled a collection with a satisfying heft and more than enough variety of subject and style to delineate the shape of a long and constantly evolving career. It eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today." New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani concurred that the collection demonstrates "the consummate virtuosity of his work."

With Electric Light, according to an Economist reviewer, Heaney "returns to the pastoral," though the critic also pointed out, "More striking are recollections of the classical sources of pastoral, as he combines allusions to Homer and Virgil with sightseeing in Greece. The 'Eclogues' of Virgil, written in the aftermath of an era of civil war, provide a suggestive analogy. Mr Heaney translates them, alludes to them and . . . imitates them. . . . Much like Virgil's, they touch on new problems that peace may bring about." According to John Taylor in Poetry, Heaney "notably attempts, as an aging man, to re-experience childhood and early-adulthood perceptions in all their sensate fullness." Taylor felt that Heaney succeeds when "reminiscing verses are moving in this subtle, withheld way," but overall found the volume disappointingly uneven and containing "more exercises than deeply-felt memorials." In contrast, Paul Mariani in America found Electric Light "a Janus-faced book, elegiac" and "heartbreaking even." Mariani noted in particular Heaney's frequent elegies to other poets and artists, and called Heaney "one of the handful writing today who has mastered that form as well."

In the prose work The Redress of Poetry, according to James Longenbach in the Nation, "Heaney wants to think of poetry not only as something that intervenes in the world, redressing or correcting imbalances, but also as something that must be redressed—reestablished, celebrated as itself." The book contains a selection of lectures the poet delivered at Oxford University on subjects ranging from Christopher Marlowe to Philip Larkin. New York Times Book Review contributor J. D. McClatchy called the lectures "a meditation on the uses of art and power, a fresh and astute defense of poetry against any attempt to reduce it to a relevant or useful commodity." However, in the Times Literary Supplement, John Bayley criticized Heaney for not providing fresh ideas about poetry, saying the book "gives the impression of being adjusted with courtly discretion to an audience who expect the familiar rather than the new." Bayley continued: "The poet as diplomat is an honourable and unusual role . . . but the critic exercising the same kind of function runs the risk of giving pleasure without surprise or illumination."

Heaney's Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001 earned the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual prize for literary criticism in the English language. John Carey in the London Sunday Times proposed that Heaney's "is not just another book of literary criticism, nor even just a book about poetry by the greatest living poet. It is a record of Seamus Heaney's thirty-year struggle with the demon of doubt. The questions that afflict him are basic. What is the good of poetry? How can it contribute to society? Is it worth the dedication it demands?" As Patricia Monaghan noted in Booklist, "Not surprisingly for a poet from a war-wracked land, Heaney comes back again and again to the question of how poetry can matter against human savagery. Again and again, he concludes that beauty and the meaning it gives to life must matter." Heaney himself described his essays as "testimonies to the fact that poets themselves are finders and keepers, that their vocation is to look after art and life by being discoverers and custodians of the unlooked for."

In addition to writing poetry and criticism, Heaney has also served as a translator of other poets' work. His version of Sophocles' Philoctetes earned praise from critics when it was performed at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1998. His translation of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf was considered groundbreaking because of the freedom he took in using modern language. Several reviewers noted that Beowulf has become something of a tired chestnut in the literary world, but credited Heaney with breathing new life into the ancient classic. Malcolm Jones in Newsweek stated: "Heaney's own poetic vernacular—muscular language so rich with the tones and smell of earth that you almost expect to find a few crumbs of dirt clinging to his lines—is the perfect match for the Beowulf poet's Anglo-Saxon. . . . As retooled by Heaney, Beowulf should easily be good for another millennium."

Heaney's Beowulf translation stirred up some controversy when in 2000 it was awarded the Whitbread Award, one of Great Britain's top literary honors. Stiff competition came in the form of a book in J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" novel series, and Rowling's supporters on the Whitbread judges panel felt that as a translation, Beowulf was not eligible for consideration; others argued that the award should be given to a more fresh, modern work than Beowulf. On the other hand, Gary McKeone commented in the Christian Science Monitor that Heaney's translation has "true literary merit. This is translation at its potent best. . . . Heaney's subtle, luminous vernacular ignites the poem for a new generation of readers."

In an interview published in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden, Heaney offered some insight into his craftsmanship: "One thing I try to avoid ever saying at readings is 'my poem'—because that sounds like a presumption. The poem came, it came. I didn't go and fetch it. To some extent you wait for it, you coax it in the door when it gets there. I prefer to think of myself as the host to the thing rather than a big-game hunter." Elsewhere in the same interview he commented: "You write books of poems because that is a fulfillment, a making; it's a making sense of your life and it gives achievement, but it also gives you a sense of growth."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Allen, Michael, editor. Seamus Heaney, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Andrews, Elmer, editor, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney:Essays, Articles, Reviews, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Beckett, Sandra L., editor, Transcending Boundaries:Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, Garland (New York, NY), 1999.

Bemporad, J., Seamus Heaney: Life and Works, Books Inc. (London, England) 1999.

Booth, James, editor, New Larkins for the Old: Critical Essays, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Brown, Terence, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, Rowman & Littlefield (Totowa, NJ), 1975.

Burris, Sydney, The Poetry of Resistance, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1990.

Buttel, Robert, Seamus Heaney, Bucknell University Press (Cranbury, NJ), 1975.

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography:Contemporary Writers, 1960 to the Present, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 25, 1983, Volume 37, 1986, Volume 74, 1993, Volume 91, 1996.

Corcoran, Neil, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study, Faber (London, England), 1998.

Curtis, Tony, editor, The Art of Seamus Heaney, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1994.

Deane, Seamus, Strange Country: Modernity andNationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 40: Poets ofGreat Britain and Ireland since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Duffy, Edna, The Subaltern Ulysses, University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Durkan, Michael J., Seamus Heaney: A ReferenceGuide, G. K. Hall (New York, NY), 1996.

Fenton, James, The Strength of Poetry?, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Garratt, Robert F., Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney, G. K. Hall (New York, NY), 1995.

Goodby, John, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History, University Press (Manchester, England), 2000.

Harmon, Maurice, editor, Image and Illusion: Anglo-Irish Literature and Its Contexts, Wolfhound Press, 1979.

Hensen, Michael, and Annette Pankratz, editors, TheAesthetics and Pragmatics of Violence, Stutz (Passau, Germany), 2001.

Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Samuels, editors, Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, Zed (London, England), 1998.

Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, J. Cape (London, England), 1995.

Kirkland, Richard, Literature and Culture in NorthernIreland since 1965: Moments of Danger, Longman (London, England), 1996.

Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. Border Crossings: Irish WomenWriters and National Identities, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2000.

Longley, Edna, Poetry in the Wars, Bloodaxe (Newcastle on Tyne, England), 1986.

Mahoney, John L., editor, Seeing into the Life ofThings: Essays on Literature and Religious Experience, Fordham University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Malloy, Catharine, and Phyllis Carey, editors, SeamusHeaney—The Shaping Spirit, University of Delaware Press (Newark, NJ), 1996.

McGuinness, Arthur E., Seamus Heaney: Poet andCritic, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1994.

Molino, Michael R., Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Catholic University of America Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Morrison, Blake, Seamus Heaney, Methuen (London, England), 1982.

O'Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney and the Place ofWriting, Florida University Press (Gainesville, FL), 2002.

O'Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney: Creating Ireland of the Mind, Liffey Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2003.

Parini, Jay, editor, British Writers: RetrospectiveSupplement I, Scribner (New York, NY), 2002.

Roberts, Neil, editor, A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Blackwell (Oxford, England), 2001.

Scott, Jamie S., and Paul Simpson-Housley, editors, Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography, andPostcolonial Literatures, Rodopi (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 2001.

Stewart, Bruce, editor, That Other World, Smythe (Gerrards Cross, England), 1998.

Thomas, Harry, editor, Talking with Poets, Handsel (New York, NY), 2002.

Tobin, Daniel, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1999.

Vendler, Helen, Seamus Heaney, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998.

Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with JohnHaffenden, Faber (London, England), 1981.

Welch, Robert, Changing States: Transformations inModern Irish Writing, Routledge (London, England), 1993.

Wills, Clair, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality inNorthern Irish Poetry, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1993.

periodicals

America, August 3, 1996, p. 24; March 29, 1997, p. 10; October 11, 1997, p. 8; December 20, 1997, p. 24; July 31, 1999, John F. Desmond, "Measures of a Poet," p. 24; July 31, 1999, p. 24; April 23, 2001, p. 25.

American Scholar, autumn, 1981.

Antioch Review, spring, 1993; spring, 1999, p. 246.

Ariel, October, 1998, p. 7.

Atlantis, June, 2001, p. 7.

Back Stage, December 19, 1997, review of The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' "Philoctetes," p. 34.

Booklist, May 1, 1996, p. 1485; October 15, 1998, review of "Opened Ground," p. 388; February 15, 2000, Ray Olson, "A New Verse Translation," p. 1073; March 15, 2001, p. 1346; May 1, 2002, p. 1499.

Books for Keeps, September, 1997, p. 30.

Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, July, 1998, p. 51; December, 1998, p. 63.

Christian Scholar's Review, fall, 2001, p. 59.

Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 1999, Elizabeth Lund, "The Enticing Sounds of This Irishman's Verse," p. 20; February 3, 2000, "' Harry Potter' Falls to a Medieval Slayer," p. 1; April 13, 2000, p. 15; April 26, 2001, p. 19.

Classical and Modern Literature, spring, 1999, p. 243; fall, 2001, p. 71.

Commonweal, May 17, 1996, p. 10; November 6, 1998, p. 18; December 1, 2000, p. 22.

Contemporary Literature, winter, 1999, p. 627.

Contemporary Review, April, 2000, p. 206.

Critical Inquiry, spring, 1982.

Critical Quarterly, spring, 1974; spring, 1976.

Daily Telegraph (London, England), February 19, 2000, p. 116; March 31, 2001; April 13, 2002; May 5, 2003.

Dalhousie Review, autumn, 2000, p. 351.

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