Seamus Heaney (1939- )

A selective list of literary criticism for Seamus Heaney, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Sites

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introduction

"Seamus Heaney." Poetry Archive. Directors, Andrew Motion & Richard Carrington.

"Seamus Heaney." A brief biography. Academy of American Poets.

Sleigh, Tom. "Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney." On the religious impulse in Bidard, Pinsky, and Heaney's poetry. Academy of American Poets.

An introduction to Seamus Heaney from the Gale-Cengage Learning.

Matthews, Steven. "Seamus Heaney." A substantial introduction to Heaney, Literary Encyclopedia, 20 September 2002. Eds. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott, Janet Todd. An introduction to the poet, from a database that provides signed literary criticism by experts in their field, and is available to individuals for a reasonably-priced subscription. On Eleven Poems (1965) [subscription service].

"Catching the heart off guard: the generous vision of Seamus Heaney." Commonweal, 17 May, 1996, by Suzanne Keen.

literary criticism

Bolton, Jonathan. "'Customary rhythms': Seamus Heaney and the rite of poetry." Says Bolton, "My chief concern in this essay is with the manner in which Heaney's three to four part station poems have come to serve as the formal equivalent of a liturgical rite." Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2001.

Boly, John. "Following Seamus Heaney's 'Follower': Toward a Performative Criticism." A reading of "The Follower." Twentieth Century Literature, Fall 2000.

Booth, J. The turf cutter and the nine-to-five man: Heaney, Larkin, and "the spiritual intellect's great work." Considers the mutual dislike of each other's work of Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin. Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1997.

Corcoran, Neil. "The state we're in." Seamus Heaney reworks Sophocles' struggle between principle and pragmatism to great effect in The Burial at Thebes, says Neil Corcoran. The Guardian, 1 May, 2004.

Curtis, Tony. Publisher's blurb for The Art of Seamus Heaney (IPG 1982).

Frazier, Adrian. "Anger and nostalgia: Seamus Heaney and the ghost of the father." Long and cogent article on anger and its transformation and his use of the past. Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter 2001.

Heaney, Seamus. "Influences: The power of T. S. Eliot." Heaney writes about the impact of T.S. Eliot on poetry in the 1950s. The Boston Review, 1989.

Hobsbaum, Philip. An interview with the British "outsider" Philip Hobsbaum who in 1963 organized The Group in Belfast.

Longley, Edna. Poetry and the Peace Process. An interview with Edna Longley. "Books and Writing," on Radio National, 7/24/05.

McDonald, Peter. A review of Heaney's Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. Poetry Review.

McDonald, Peter. Chapter 1 of Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford UP 1997) First chapter from a standard work, covers Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Paul Muldoon among others.

McSweeney, Kerry. "Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney." Discusses specific allusions in some of Heaney's poems, judging them as sometimes successful and sometimes not. Style, Spring 1999.

Molino, Michael R. Publisher's blurb for Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Catholic U of America P 1994).

OBrien, Eugene. "At the Frontier of Language." "This paper will demonstrate how the linguistics of poetry can be successfully interrogated by the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and will go on to show how this deconstruction becomes operative in terms of analysing the political situation in Northern Ireland." Minerva (internet journal) 1 (1996).

OBrien, Eugene. Publisher's blurb for Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (U P of Fla. 2003).

Parker, Michael. A review of Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. Contemporary Review, Nov. 1993, by John McGurk.

Paulin, Tom. "The Influence of Robert Frost on Irish Poetry." On Robert Frost's effect on vernacular in Irish poetry; how Seamus Heany and Paul Muldoon first encountered Frost's writing; Frost's presence in their work. Columbia U Seminar in Irish Studies, 6 Dec. 2002.

Pellegrino, Joe. Seamus Heaney's Proleptic Elegies. Kentucky Philological Review 13 (1998).

Purdy, Anthony. The bog body as mnemotope: nationalist archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier. "Mnemotope" as "a chronotopic motif manifesting the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the life of a culture or, metaphorically, an individual. Of course, the mnemotope might come in many guises and be inflected by attitudinal values ranging from nostalgia and melancholy through desire, obsession and remembrance to horror and denial. Its preferred genre might be pastoral or testimony, but it might function equally well in western or film noir, historical romance, epic or ghost story. In intertextual terms its potential range is vast, running the gamut from homage and remake to parody and pastiche" [and Michel Tournier]. Style, Spring 2002.

Tobin, Daniel. Publisher's blurb for Passage To The Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (UP of Kentucky 1998).

Tracey, Robert. Tracey briefly defends Heaney against a charge of "verbal affectations" and explicates some sources of Heaney's language and imagery. "Heaney's 'Tollund Man,' and similar poems in North, are partly based on his reading of The Bog People by the Danish archaeologist, P. Glob, a book Heaney has often mentioned in interviews." NYRB letter, 5/15/80.

Triggs, Jeffery Alan. "Hurt into Poetry: The Political Verses of Seamus Heaney and Robert Bly." The New Orleans Review 19 (1992).

Vendler, Helen. Publisher's blurb for Helen Vendler's study of Heaney, Seamus Heaney, (Harvard UP 1998).

Vendler, Helen. A review of Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney. (Harvard UP 1998) Reviewed by Jonathan Allison in SAMLA Review (removed) Another review. Commonweal, 6 Nov. 1998, by Daria Donnelly.

Welch, Robert. "Faultlines, limits, transgressions: a theme-cluster in late twentieth-century Irish poetry." The poetry of John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and others. Eire-Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003.

Review of Electric Light by Seamus Heaney (Faber) by Casterton, Julie, in Ambit 165 (2001).

On the Mead Bench Review of Seamus Heaney: Beowulf. London: Faber by Nick Gammage in Thumbscrew 15 (Winter/Spring 2000).

Shaking the dust bag On The School Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (Faber). By Smith, Laurie. Magma 10 (Summer 1997).

Cultural Context, Study Guides, Libraries

Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland 1968-Present. Information and source material on 'the Troubles' and politics in Northern Ireland.

An article on the Bog People, helpful for explaining many of the references in Heaney's poems. Includes pictures of Tollund Man and Grauballe Man.

A web site on peatlands in Northern Ireland "Our peatlands are a history book. Peat is renowned for preserving the organic and inorganic remains of settlements, including tombs, farms, trackways, implements and bog bodies." UK Environment and Heritage Service.

Details on the Belfast Group provided by Emory U, which now owns many original Group sheets. Includes an overview of the Group's history and a catalog of the sheets.

The International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures an actively maintained site that contains a wealth of information and news on exhibitions, journals, conferences, and more.

A lesson plan for some poems by Seamus Heaney aimed at high school students, from the BBC.

Moore, Andrew. A study guide for Seamus Heaney contains 2-3 paragraph discussions of the following poems: Storm on the Island, Perch, Blackberry-Picking, Death of a Naturalist, Digging, Follower, At a Potato Digging. Discussion questions for students.

On the acquisition of Seamus Heaney papers at Emory U.

On the acquisition of the Leonard L. Milberg '53 Collection of Irish Poetry by Princeton. Press release 4/10/98.

Removed Articles

A roundtable of Irish authors tackles the topic, "Joyce. Yeats. Beckett. Wilde. What is it about Ireland that's produced such a disproportionate share of great writers?" Authors on the Web, 2002 (removed).

Overview of the Irish conflict, beginning with the partition of Ireland in 1921, from the BBC (removed).

The Seamus Heaney Summer School at the Institute of Irish Studies (removed).

Andrews, Elmer, ed. http://128.59.59.214/cu/cup/catalog/data/023111/0231119267.HTM Publisher's blurb for The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Columbia UP 2000) (removed).

Corcoran, Neil. http://www.samla.org/sar/01wKimmer.html Review of Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext. (Southern Illinois UP 1999). SAMLA, reviewed by Garland Kimmer (removed).

Corcoran, Neil. http://www.faber.co.uk/xview_book.cgi?book_id=731&genre=0&subgenre=0 Publisher's blurb for Neil Corcoran's A Student's Guide to Seamus Heaney (Faber, 1986) (removed).

Niekrasz, Andrzej. "I will live content elsewhere": The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Winner of the WW Norton prize for best undergraduate essay 1998 (removed).

OBrien, Eugene. Publisher's blurb for Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (U of Michigan P 2003)(removed).

Pellegrino, Joe. "Seamus Heaney: A Critical Introduction." The Internet Poetry Archive, 1996 (removed).

Stefanovic, Suzana. Seamus Heaney: The Poet and His Tradition. The influence of the English literary tradition, especially of Wordsworth, on Heaney. Linguistics and Literature 2 (2001) (removed).

Tobin, Daniel. A review of Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. (UP of Kentucky, 1999). SAMLA 65-1, reviewed by Jonathan Hufstader (removed).

Williams, Kirsty. Ambivalent Subject Positions: "Redressing Seamus Heaney's Early Poetry" on whether the poetry expresses a unified self. Ecologa 3 (Autumn 2003) http://www.strath.ac.uk/ecloga/williams.pdf (removed).

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20050603/ai_n14652365 The 5-Minute Interview: Seamus Heaney, Poet and Nobel Laureate - in The Independent, (London), 3 June 2005, by Matthew Beard (removed).

http://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/html/archive/confidential.htm "Tony Curtis, Seamus Heaney and Confidential Poetry," by Anne Stevenson, in Planet Magazine152 (removed).

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