The Irish voice of the earth Seamus Heaney. Born into a Catholic family in 1939 in the county of...

The Irish voice of the earth

Seamus HeaneySeamus Heaney

• Born into a Catholic family in 1939 in the county of Derry, Northern Ireland.

• At school became aware of the religious and cultural division of Ulster.

• Graduated in English Language and Literature in Belfast in 1961.

1. LifeSeamus Heaney

Only Connect ... New Directions

Seamus Heaney

• 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


Seamus Heaney

1. Life

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

2. Works


Seamus Heaney

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


Seamus Heaney

2. Works

Seamus Heaney

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.

2. Works


Seamus Heaney

• Rural County Derry is the “country of the mind”.

Seamus Heaney

3. The voice of the earth

• Emphasis on human work: ploughing and digging, butter-churning, the blackberry and potato picking.

Ardmore, Ireland


• The poet is intimately involved with his own community, the inheritor of rural traditions of labour and service.

Seamus Heaney

• The interchange between man and nature enlarges the poet’s consciousness.


Ardmore, Ireland

3. The voice of the earth

Always present in Heaney’s poetry is the shadow of the violent conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Seamus Heaney

4. Heaney and politics


French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass.

Seamus Heaney

4. Heaney and politics

Poetry is split between a need for creative freedom and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as a citizen.


French poster for Bloody Sunday (2002), directed by Paul Greengrass.

The poet’s task is not to condemn, but to draw back and examine the historical reasons and psychological consequences behind them.

this gives his work universal meaning and almost mythic resonance.

Seamus Heaney

5. The poet’s task


The poems evoke figures who suffer some kind of human diminishment: isolation, repression, disenchantment, exploitation or betrayal.

They stand for those historically dispossessed and maltreated, and act as exemplars of suffering and endurance.

Seamus Heaney

6. The elegiac Heaney


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

7. Death and memory


Seamus Heaney

• Presence of a speaker viewing the story from his own particular place and time.

• A quatrain form where there is:

Seamus Heaney

8. Style

- the dissolving of line into line and image into image

- the use of enjambement

- two stresses to 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


The Irish voice of the earth Seamus Heaney. Born into a Catholic family in 1939 in the county of...

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