Philip Arthur Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin

Philip Larkin
Photograph by Fay Godwin
Born	9 August 1922 Coventry, Warwickshire, England
Died	2 December 1985 (aged 63) Hull, Humberside, England
Cause of death	Cancer of oesophagus
Resting place	Cottingham municipal cemetery 53°47′00.98″N 0°25′50.19″WCoordinates: 53°47′00.98″N 0°25′50.19″W
Nationality	British
Alma mater	St John's College, Oxford
Occupation	Poet, librarian, novelist, jazz critic
Employer	University of Hull for 30 years
Notable work(s)	The Whitsun Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974)
Parents	Sydney Larkin (1884–1948), Eva Emily Day (1886–1977)

, CH, CBE, FRSL (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet and novelist. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered together in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973).He was the recipient of many honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of poet laureate in 1984, following the death of John Betjeman.
After graduating from Oxford in 1943 with a first in English language and literature, Larkin became a librarian. It was during the thirty years he served as university librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull that he produced the greater part of his published work. His poems are marked by what Andrew Motion calls a very English, glum accuracy about emotions, places, and relationships, and what Donald Davie described as lowered sights and diminished expectations. Eric Homberger called him "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket"—Larkin himself said that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth.Influenced by W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, his poems are highly structured but flexible verse forms. They were described by Jean Hartley, the ex-wife of Larkin's publisher George Hartley (The Marvell Press), as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent", though anthologist Keith Tuma writes that there is more to Larkin's work than its reputation for dour pessimism suggests.
Larkin's public persona was that of the no-nonsense, solitary Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the trappings of the public literary life. The posthumous publication by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 of his letters triggered controversy about his personal life and political views, described by John Banville as hair-raising, but also in places hilarious. Lisa Jardine called him a "casual, habitual racist, and an easy misogynist", but the academic John Osborne argued in 2008 that "the worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment". Despite the controversy Larkin was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey, almost two decades after his death, as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years, and in 2008 The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer.
In 1973 a Coventry Evening Telegraph reviewer referred to Larkin as "the bard of Coventry", but in 2010, 25 years after his death, it was Larkin's adopted home city, Kingston upon Hull, that commemorated him with the Larkin 25 Festival which culminated in the unveiling of a statue of Larkin by Martin Jennings on 2 December 2010, the 25th anniversary of his death.

Poetry

Main article: List of poems by Philip Larkin

• The North Ship, The Fortune Press, 1945, ISBN 978-0-571-10503-8
• XX Poems, Privately Printed, 1951
• The Less Deceived, The Marvell Press, 1955, ISBN 978-0-900533-06-8
  • "Church Going"
  • "Toads"
  • "Maiden Name"
  • "Born Yesterday" (written for the birth of Sally Amis)
  • "Lines on a Young Lady's Autograph Album"
• The Whitsun Weddings, Faber and Faber, 1964, ISBN 978-0-571-09710-4
  • "The Whitsun Weddings"
  • "An Arundel Tomb"
  • "A Study of Reading Habits"
  • "Home is So Sad"
  • "Mr Bleaney"
• High Windows, Faber and Faber, 1974, ISBN 978-0-571-11451-1
  • "This Be The Verse"
  • "Annus Mirabilis"
  • "The Explosion"
  • "The Building"
  • "High Windows"
• Thwaite, Anthony, ed. (1988), Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-15386-0
  • "Aubade" (first published 1977)
  • "Party Politics" (last published poem)
  • "The Dance" (unfinished & unpublished)
  • "Love Again" (unpublished)

Thomas Hardy,

Thomas Hardy,

Born	2 June 1840 Stinsford, Dorchester, Dorset, England
Died	11 January 1928 (aged 87) Dorchester, Dorset, England
Resting place	Stinsford parish church (heart) Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey (ashes)
Occupation	Novelist, Poet, and Short Story writer
Alma mater	King's College London
Literary movement	Naturalism, Victorian literature
Notable work(s)	Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, Collected Poems Jude the Obscure
Spouse(s)	Emma Lavinia Gifford (1874–1912) Florence Dugdale (1914–28)

 OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism, especially by William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens is another important influence on Thomas Hardy.Like Dickens, he was also highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially therefore he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, since the 1950s Hardy has been recognized as a major poet, and had a significant influence on The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Phillip Larkin.
The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in south west England.

Poetry

Thomas Hardy by Walter William Ouless, 1922

For the full text of several poems, see the External links section

In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and after a great amount of negative criticism erupted from the publication of his novel Jude The Obscure, Hardy decided to give up writing novels permanently and to focus his literary efforts on writing poetry. After giving up the novel form, Hardy continued to publish poetry collections until his death in 1928. Although he did publish one last novel in 1897, that novel, The Well-Beloved, had actually been written prior to Jude the Obscure.
Although his poems were not initially as well received by his contemporaries as his novels were, Hardy is now recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His verse had a profound influence on later writers, notably Philip Larkin, who included many of Hardy's poems in the edition of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse that Larkin edited in 1973.
In a recent biography on Hardy, Claire Tomalin argues that Hardy became a truly great English poet after the death of his first wife, Emma, beginning with the elegies he wrote in her memory. Tomalin declares these poems among "the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry.

William Blake

William Blake

William Blake
William Blake in a portrait by Thomas Phillips (1807)
Born	28 November 1757 London, England
Died	12 August 1827 (aged 69) London, England
Occupation	Poet, painter, printmaker
Genres	Visionary, poetry
Literary movement	Romanticism
Notable work(s)	Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, Milton a Poem, And did those feet in ancient time
Spouse(s)	Catherine Blake (1782–1827)

 William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced" In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".
Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic" for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, though later he rejected many of these beliefs he maintained an amiable relationship with Thomas Paine, he was also influenced by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised him as a "glorious luminary," and "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors

James Thomson

1700–1748 Because the long, reflective landscape poem The Seasons (1730) commanded so much attention and affection for at least a hundred years after James Thomson wrote it, his achievement has been identified with it. Thomson, however, was also a political figure through other poems and through some of his plays, standing strongly for a kind of republican ideal against what he saw as the vulpine individualism and oligarchic government of Robert Walpole. As a Scot who spent his adult life in England, he embodied in his work a comity between the two lands and traditions. Partly with these sociopolitical interests in mind, partly to complement the sweep and poignancy of The Seasons, he wrote five tragedies and a patriotic masque of some distinction. Finally, his Spenserian allegory, The Castle of Indolence(1748), stands as the finest in English other than Spenser’s own. The son of the Scots clergyman Thomas Thomson and Beatrix Trotter Thomson of Berwickshire, Thomson was born on 11 September 1700 in Ednam, Scotland, a few miles north of the River Tweed, which marks the Scots-English boundary. On this poor, isolated, hilly territory, country people scratched out bare livings. Critics eager to spy out biographical influences on The Seasons have found the goads to Thomson’s pictorial imagination in this border landscape, with its slopes and streams, skies heavy with clouds above the moors, and the constant play of light upon natural objects in such a changeable, assertive climate. Thomson’s own family was large—he was the fourth of nine children—and, tucked away in barren country, he must have spent a great deal of time in familial games, tasks, and learning. His household, as one would expect from that of a clergyman father and a mother whose “devotional exercises,” according to Patrick Murdoch, were raised by her warm imagination “to a pitch bordering on enthusiasm,” gave him intimate knowledge of the Bible, that prime source of literary sublimity in the eighteenth century. Again, one can fancy that his early life was grist for The Seasons, in which love and family take on a rosy gleam and where God in His majesty pervades the text. As to his later life, as opposed to his poetry, he left the wild scenery of Scotland for London streets, never married or raised a family himself, and though he remained a profoundly religious man, lapsed from his Christian faith.
Beginning at the age of twelve, Thomson was sent to school, first for three years at Jedburgh, eight miles from home, and then, in 1715, at the College of Edinburgh, some fifty miles north. He was to be in Edinburgh for ten years. After a short time his family embosomed him again, for in February 1716 Thomas Thomson died, allegedly by being struck on the head by a ball of fire while exorcising a ghost at Woolie. Since Beatrix Thomson could, of course, no longer live in the manse, she chose to bring her family to the capital. Thomson may have once again enjoyed the comforts and suffered the constraints of home, but he now found himself in a culturally exciting environment. While at Jedburgh, his learning and writing had been fostered by interested neighborhood gentry, including Robert Riccaltoun and William Bennet, the latter a frequent host to the prolific, charming Scots songwriter, patriot, and poet Allan Ramsay, whom young Thomson may then have met. In Edinburgh he was exposed to new literature, such as the periodical work of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and the poetry of Alexander Pope, and to new doctrines, including those of Isaac Newton. Those with common interests formed clubs and societies in which they could discuss readings, debate one another, share the pleasures of the taverns in which they met, and exchange criticism and support for their own work as writers. Thomson became a member of the Grotesque Club. He had not been a stellar student and, according to his fellow club member and lifelong friend David Malloch, did not shine in the club either. Nonetheless, as a member in early January 1720 he did publish his first verse, three mediocre but not desperately weak poems in The Edinburgh Miscellany. All three are in couplets, and all bear the marks of a gentlemanly idleness, a refusal of focus and commitment.
In 1719 Thomson finished his arts course without taking a degree, a common procedure, and entered divinity studies as a scholarship student (in Scots terminology, a bursar); he held the bursary for four years. This new course of study was not very exacting; it certainly did not impede Thomson from continuing in his literary career. The annals of eighteenth-century poetry include a good deal of verse by clergymen, fancifully or earnestly whiling away their bucolic hours, and perhaps Thomson would have ended up in earned obscurity if he had been an Englishman. His talents were ill suited for casual verse. Fortunately for literature, however, the Scots church was hostile to poetic effusions. According to Murdoch, when Thomson performed an exercise in divinity class, the paraphrase of a psalm, in too florid a way, Professor William Hamilton at Edinburgh “told him, smiling, that if he thought of being useful in the ministry, he must keep a stricter rein on his imagination, and express himself in a language more intelligible to an ordinary congregation.” In general the Scots at the time seem to have tended toward respect for the practical and snorted about the poetical. As he became less willing to give over his life and skills to the church, Thomson came progressively to realize that as a writer he would never revel in a large audience if he stayed in Scotland. By 1724, when a poem probably his, “The Works and Wonders of Almighty Power,” appeared in Aaron Hill’s London periodical The Plain Dealer, he seems to have made up his mind to go south, as his friend Malloch (by then anglicized to “Mallet”) had done the year before. Armed with letters of introduction to well-placed Scots in London, Thomson sailed from Leith early in 1725, never again to set foot in Scotland.
After a few months of unhappy floundering, made more painful by his mother’s death in mid May, his contacts found him a job as tutor to the son of the minor poet Charles, Lord Binning, who was himself the son of a minor poet, Thomas Hamilton, Earl of Haddington, and the son-in-law of the poet and songwriter Lady Grizel Baillie. At Lord Binning’s country house at East Barnet, some ten miles north of London, Thomson set about teaching his pupil to read; he also taught himself to write a new, blank-verse poetry, as he worked on Winter. How much of this remarkable poem was written in Scotland and how much in England is not known, but at the end of the winter of 1725-1726 it was complete, and it appeared in April 1726. The second edition of Winter was published in July, and two further reimpressions came out the same year. To Thomson’s eventual pleasure, his dedicatee Spencer Compton, speaker of the House of Commons, found that he could not continue to ignore the young Scot, and an interview between them ended with Thomson twenty guineas richer. Confident and on his way to being famous, Thomson began work on Summer, which appeared in February 1727, two years after his arrival in London. It confirmed the success of the poetic mode first deployed in Winter.
“Blank verse,” wrote Raymond Dexter Havens, “seems to have been regarded in 1725 much as the telephone was in 1875, as a remarkable toy which it was interesting to experiment with but of which only a few enthusiasts expected to make any real use.” Bell did not patent his phone until 1876, however, whereas by Havens’s count, some 150 post-Miltonic blank-verse poems (some very short) preceded Winter. Unlike those 150, though, Winter is sustained, serious, and skillful. The earlier blank-verse corpus, which led Thomson to write and the public to accept this new poem, included Milton’s epics Paradise Lost(1667) and Paradise Regained (1671) as its most distinguished nondramatic examples. It also included every tragedy current on the London stage, and Thomson couched Winter as a prolonged soliloquy or dialogue with oneself and one’s surroundings. The speaker does often launch into imperatives that in some other poem, in another idiom, might address a reader directly: “See! Winter comes”; “Behold! the wellpois’d Hornet, hovering, hangs”; “Now ... let me wander o’er the russet Mead”; “Oh! bear me then to high, embowering, Shades.” Here, though, they represent an inner urgency on the part of the speaker as his eye lights on the hornet or a keen wish strikes him. To some extent like soliloquists in drama, Thomson’s speaker draws readers in to his inner state, but through indirect address. A combination of sympathy with the alert, urgent speaker and the resonance of the imperative form makes Thomson’s reader a tacitly summoned participant in the speaker’s excitement.
This roundabout way of talking to the audience makes apropos the analogy with blank-verse dramatic soliloquies, including those in Paradise Lost. Yet there is a difference. In Thomson, the effect is, by intention, psychologically shallow: whereas the self-absorbed Satan, the leading soliloquizer in Milton’s poem, acts—busying himself making a hell of heaven—Thomson’s speaker cultivates pure reaction. For example, he welcomes the “Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms.... that exalt the Soul to solemn Thought” and become “kindred Glooms” and “wish’d, wint’ry, Horrors.” As the scenes in Winter typify that season, so the speaker as onlooker must typify responses to it, and this interplay of what is common, open, broadly available in the world and in the speaker helps to express the sense of community that is central not only to this poem but to all Thomson’s mature work. Nature in Winter is objective, “out there,” and Thomson’s speaker, through typification, becomes an analogue to this objectivity, though with a difference. Thomson typifies winter kaleidoscopically, by adding and mirroring new scenes one after the other; in contrast, his uniformly responsive speaker hardly develops a personality at all. Still, however standard the responses, Winter requires that they seem to emerge from experience. They could plausibly be framed in a blank verse that had strong generic associations with the drama. For Thomson himself, in whose mind the I, “nurs’d by careless Solitude”, was probably not pure textual fiction, the use of dramatic monologue allowed him to accommodate his Scots experience to his new, English life: a young emigré author might be jarred in moving from Edinburgh to London, from a city of about thirty-five thousand people tightly nested in rural land to a city of about six hundred thousand, with room for urban sprawl. A dramatic self-projection, which is a self-reduction, allows him to be personal and at the same time to rise above the merely personal.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney currently lives in Dublin. Heaney taught at Harvard University from 1985 to 2006, where he was a Visiting Professor, and then Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University (1985-1997) and Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence (1998-2006). Heaney has attracted a readership on several continents and has won prestigious literary awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize. 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. The 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 is known for its aural beauty and finely-wrought textures. Often described as a regional poet, he is also a traditionalist who deliberately gestures back towards the “pre-modern” worlds of William Wordsworth and John Clare.
Heaney was born and raised in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. The impact of his surroundings and the details of his upbringing on his work are immense. As a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland, Heaney once described himself in the New York Times Book Review as someone who "emerged from a hidden, a buried life and entered the realm of education." Eventually studying English at Queen’s University, Heaney 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." Heaney’s work has always been most concerned with the past, even his earliest poems of the 1960s. 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 (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969)—evoke "a hard, mainly rural life with rare exactness," according to Parnassus contributor Michael Wood. Using descriptions of rural laborers and their tasks and contemplations of natural phenomena—filtered through childhood and adulthood—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," noted Newsweek correspondent Jack Kroll

As a poet from Northern Ireland, Heaney used his work to reflect upon the "Troubles," the often-violent political struggles that plagued the country during Heaney’s young adulthood. The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). While some reviewers criticized Heaney for being an apologist and mythologizer, 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."

Heaney’s first foray into the world of translation began with the Irish lyric poem Buile Suibhne. The work concerns an ancient king who, cursed by the church, is transformed into a mad bird-man 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 (1984). New York Times Book Review contributor Brendan Kennelly 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. The poems reflect one of the book’s larger themes, the connections between personal choices, dramas and losses and larger, more universal forces such as history and language. In The Haw Lantern (1987)Heaney extends many of these preoccupations. W. S. DiPiero described Heaney's focus: "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."

With the publication of Selected Poems, 1966-1987 (1990) 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 (1991) 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'… have never figured largely in Heaney's poetry," Hunter explained. However, in Seeing Things Heaney uses such words to "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." The Spirit Level (1996) continues to explore humanism, politics and nature.

Always respectfully received, Heaney’s later work, including his second collected poems, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1998), has been lavishly praised. Reviewing Opened Ground for the New York Times Book Review, Edward Mendelson commented that the volume “eloquently confirms [Heaney’s] status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today." With Electric Light (2001), Heaney broadened his range of allusion and reference to Homer and Virgil, while continuing to make significant use of memory, elegy and the pastoral tradition. 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." 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."
Heaney’s next volume District and Circle (2006) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. Commenting on the volume for the New York Times, critic Brad Leithauser found it remarkably consistent with the rest of Heaney’s oeuvre. But while Heaney’s career may demonstrate an “of-a-pieceness” not common in poetry, Leithauser found that Heaney’s voice still “carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken—even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say.”
Increasingly seen as an “elder statesman” of poetry, Heaney’s prose constitutes an important part of his work. Heaney often uses prose to address concerns taken up obliquely in his poetry. In The Redress of Poetry (1995), 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—re-established, celebrated as itself." The book contains a selection of lectures the poet delivered at Oxford University as Professor of Poetry. Heaney's Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001 (2002) 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…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?" 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."

As a translator, Heaney’s most famous work is the translation of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (2000). Considered groundbreaking because of the freedom he took in using modern language, the book is largely credited with revitalizing what had become something of a tired chestnut in the literary world. 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." Though he has also translated Sophocles, Heaney remains most adept with medieval works. He translated Robert Henryson’s Middle Scots classic and follow-up to Chaucer, The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables in 2009.
In 2009, Seamus Heaney turned 70. A true event in the poetry world, Ireland marked the occasion with a twelve-hour broadcast of archived Heaney recordings. It was also announced that two-thirds of the poetry collections sold in the UK the previous year had been Heaney titles. Such popularity is almost unheard of in the world of contemporary poetry, and yet Heaney’s voice is unabashedly grounded in tradition. Heaney’s belief in the power of art and poetry, regardless of technological change or economic collapse, offers hope in the face of an increasingly uncertain future. Asked about the value of poetry in times of crisis, Heaney answered it is precisely at such moments that people realize they need more to live than economics: “If poetry and the arts do anything,” he has said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness."

Bibliography

POETRY

• 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.
• District and Circle, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2006.

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 of Poetry (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 ofThe 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 to Frost, 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 of Life, 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 You Are: Writing on Irish and American Literature and History, edited by Christopher Cahill, New York Review Books, 2003.
• (Translator) The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' "Antigone," Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2004.
• (Translator) The Testament of Cresseid, Enitharmon Press, 2004.
• (Translator) Columcille the Scribe, The Royal Irish Academy, 2004.
• (Translator) The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, Faber and Faber, 2009.

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.

Further Reading

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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 and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1997.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 40: Poets of Great 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 Reference Guide, 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, The Aesthetics 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 Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger, Longman (London, England), 1996.
• Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers 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 of Things: Essays on Literature and Religious Experience, Fordham University Press (New York, NY), 1998.
• Malloy, Catharine, and Phyllis Carey, editors, Seamus Heaney—The Shaping Spirit, University of Delaware Press (Newark, NJ), 1996.
• McGuinness, Arthur E., Seamus Heaney: Poet and Critic, 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 of Writing, 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: Retrospective Supplement 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, and Postcolonial 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 John Haffenden, Faber (London, England), 1981.
• Welch, Robert, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing, Routledge (London, England), 1993.
• Wills, Clair, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern 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.
• Economist, September 12, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 14; November 20, 1999, "Translations of the Spirit," p. 101; June 23, 2001, p. 121.
• Eire-Ireland, summer, 1978; winter, 1980; fall-winter, 2001, p. 7.
• Encounter, November, 1975.
• English, summer-autumn, 1997; summer, 1998, p. 111; summer, 2000, p. 143; summer, 2001, p. 149.
• Essays in Criticism, April, 1998, p. 144.
• Evening Standard, April 9, 2001, p. 47; April 8, 2002, p. 52.
• Explicator, fall, 2002, p. 56.
• Financial Times, March 21, 1998, p. 5; March 24, 2001, p. 4; March 30, 2002, p. 4; September 27, 2003, p. 26.
• Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), September 3, 1988.
• Guardian (London, England), April 3, 1997, p. 9; October 9, 1999, p. 6; October 16, 1999, p. 10; October 18, 1999, p. 17; December 4, 1999, p. 11; January 19, 2000, p. 21; January 29, 2000, p. 3; September 30, 2000, p. 11; March 24, 2001, p. 12; April 7, 2001, p. 8; July 27, 2002, p. 21.
• Harper's, March, 1981.
• Harvard Review, fall, 1999, p. 74; fall, 2000, p. 12.
• Independent (London, England), April 5, 1997, p. 7; December 1, 1997, p. 5; September 5, 1998, p. 17; September 8, 1998, p. 11; April 10, 1999, p. 5; October 2, 1999, p. 10; January 26, 2000, p. 5; January 29, 2000, p. 5; March 31, 2001, p. 10; June 16, 2001, p. 11; December 8, 2001, p. 9; February 19, 2003, p. 5; September 27, 2003, p. 33.
• Independent on Sunday (London, England), April 6, 1997, p. 29; July 20, 1997, p. 32; November 9, 1997, p. 38; September 6, 1998, p. 10; March 21, 1999, p. 9; April 4, 1999, p. 11; October 10, 1999, p. 10; April 8, 2001, p. 46.
• Irish Literary Supplement, fall, 1997, p. 14.
• Irish Studies Review , spring, 1996; December, 2002, p. 303.
• Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland), February 22, 2003, p. 61; April 12, 2003, p. 62; July 5, 2003, p. 57; July 12, 2003, p. 59; July 19, 2003, p. 55; August 2, 2003, p. 59; October 25, 2003, p. 55.
• Irish University Review, spring-summer, 1998, pp. 56, 68; autumn-winter, 1999, p. 358.
• Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, spring, 2000, p. 51.
• Journal of Modern Literature, summer, 2000, pp. 471, 597; fall, 2001, p. 1.
• Jouvert, fall, 1999, p. 40.
• Kentucky Philological Review, March, 1998, p. 17.
• Kenyon Review, winter, 2002, p. 160.
• Kliatt, March, 1998, p. 57.
• Library Journal, May 15, 1997, review of The Spirit Level, p. 120; September 1, 1997, review of The Spirit Level, p. 235; April 1, 1999, Barbara Hoffert, review of Opened Ground, p. 96; December, 1999, Thomas L. Cooksey, review of Beowulf, p. 132; August, 2000, p. 110; April 1, 2001, p. 104; April 1, 2002, p. 106; June 1, 2002, p. 155.
• Listener, December 7, 1972; November 8, 1973; September 25, 1975; December 20-27, 1984.
• Lit, October, 1999, pp. 149, 181.
• Literature and Theology, March, 2003, p. 32.
• London Review of Books, November 1-14, 1984; May 27, 1999, review of Opened Ground, p. 20.
• Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1984; January 5, 1989; December 31, 2000, p. 6; April 22, 2001, p. 3.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 2, 1980; October 21, 1984; June 2, 1985; October 27, 1987; August 26, 1990; December 27, 1992.
• Nation, November 10, 1979; December 4, 1995, p. 716; January 4, 1999, Jay Parini, review of Opened Ground, p. 25.
• New Boston Review, August-September, 1980.
• New Criterion, May, 2000, p. 31.
• New Literary History, winter, 1999, p. 239.
• New Republic, March 27, 1976; December 22, 1979; April 30, 1984; February 18, 1985; January 13, 1997, review of Homage to Robert Frost, p. 14; February 28, 2000, Nicholas Howe, "Scullionspeak," p. 32; February 28, 2000, p. 32.
• New Statesman, April 25, 1997; September 18, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 54; April 15, 2001, p. 53.
• Newsweek, February 2, 1981; April 15, 1985; February 28, 2000, Malcolm Jones, "'Beowulf' Brawling: A Classic Gets a Makeover," p. 68.
• New Yorker, September 28, 1981; September 23, 1985; March 20, 2000, pp. 54, 56-66, 68, 79.
• New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973; September 30, 1976; March 6, 1980; October 8, 1981; March 14, 1985; June 25, 1992; March 4, 1999, Fintan O'Toole, review of Opened Ground, p. 43; July 20, 2000, p. 18; November 29, 2001, p. 49; December 5, 2002, p. 54.
• New York Times, April 22, 1979; January 11, 1985; November 24, 1998, Michiko Kakutani, review of Opened Ground; January 30, 1999, p. B11; January 20, 2000, Sarah Lyall, "Wizard vs. Dragon: A Close Contest, but the Fire-Breather Wins," p. A17; January 27, 2000, p. A27; February 22, 2000, Richard Eder, "Beowulf and Fate Meet in a Modern Poet's Lens," p. B8; March 20, 2000, Mel Gussow, "An Anglo-Saxon Chiller (with an Irish Touch)," p. B1; February 1, 2001, pB3, E3; April 20, 2001, p. B37, E39; May 27, 2001, p. AR19; June 2, 2001, p. A15, B9; September 30, 2002, p. B3, E3.
• New York Times Book Review, March 26, 1967; April 18, 1976; December 2, 1979; December 21, 1980; May 27, 1984; March 10, 1985; March 5, 1989; December 14, 1995, p. 15; June 1, 1997, p. 52; December 20, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 10; June 6, 1999, review of Opened Ground, p. 37; February 27, 2000, James Shapiro, "A Better 'Beowulf'" p. 6; December 3, 2000, p. 9; April 8, 2001, p. 16; April 29, 2001, p. 22; June 3, 2001, p. 24; October 6, 2002, p. 33.
• New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1983.
• Nexos, July, 1999, p. 83.
• Observer (London, England), March 23, 1997, p. 16; January 4, 1998, p. 15; September 6, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 17; November 7, 1999, p. 8; January 23, 2000, p. 11; September 10, 2000, p. 16; April 15, 2001, p. 15; April 7, 2002, p. 13.
• Papers on Language and Literature, spring, 2001, p. 205.
• Parnassus, spring-summer, 1974; fall-winter, 1977; fall-winter, 1979.
• Partisan Review, number 3, 1986; fall, 1997, p. 674.
• Philosophy and Literature, October, 2002, p. 405.
• Poetry, June, 1992; December, 2000, p. 211; February, 2002, p. 296.
• Princeton University Library Chronicle, spring, 1998, p. 559.
• Publishers Weekly, April 29, 1996, p. 63; January 27, 1997, p. 14; November 2, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 74; February 7, 2000, Jana Riess, "Heaney Takes U.K.'s Whitbread Prize," p. 18; February 14, 2000, Judy Quinn, "Will Readers Cry 'Wulf'?," p. 86; February 21, 2000, review of Beowulf, p. 84; March 13, 2000, Daisy Maryles, "A Real Backlist Mover," p. 22; August 14, 2000, p. 349; September 4, 2000, p. 44; February 19, 2001, p. 87.
• Saturday Review, July-August, 1985.
• Sewanee Review, winter, 1976; April-June, 1998, p. 184.
• South Carolina Review , fall, 1999, pp. 119, 132.
• Southern Review, January, 1980; spring, 2000, p. 418; spring, 2002, p. 358.
• Spectator, September 6, 1975; December 1, 1979; November 24, 1984; June 27, 1987; September 16, 1995, p. 39; September 5, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 36; April 6, 2002, p. 32.
• Sunday Times (London, England), September 6, 1998, p. 7; October 3, 1999, p, 4; October 17, 1999, p. 41; February 6, 2000, p. 18; October 1, 2000, p. 46; December 10, 2000, p. 16; April 1, 2001, p. 35; April 14, 2002, p. 34; April 13, 2003, p. 49.
• Symbiosis, April, 1999, p. 63; October, 2002, p. 133.
• Time, March 19, 1984; February 25, 1985; October 16, 1995; March 20, 2000, Paul Gray, "There Be Dragons: Seamus Heaney's Stirring Translation of Beowulf Makes Waves on Both Shores of the Atlantic," p. 84.
• Times (London, England), October 11, 1984; January 24, 1985; October 22, 1987; June 3, 1989; September 11, 1998, p. 21; October 29, 1998, p. 44; March 27, 1999, p. 16; September 23, 1999, p. 42; October 26, 1999, p. 50; May 20, 2000, p. 19; April 4, 2001, p. 15; April 17, 2002, p. 21; July 2, 2003, p. 2.
• Times Educational Supplement, November 7, 1997, p. 2; September 11, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 11.
• Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 1966; July 17, 1969; December 15, 1972; August 1, 1975; February 8, 1980; October 31, 1980; November 26, 1982; October 19, 1984; June 26, 1987; July 1-7, 1988; December 6, 1991; October 20, 1995, p. 9.
• Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 19, 1981; September 9, 1984; November 8, 1987; November 25, 1990.
• Twentieth Century Literature, fall, 2000, p. 269.
• Twentieth-Century Studies, November, 1970.
• U.S. News and World Report, March 20, 2000, Brendan I. Koerner, "Required Reading," p. 68.
• Variety, May 4, 1998, Markland Taylor, review of "The Cure at Troy," p. 96.
• Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1992.
• Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1999, review of Opened Ground, p. W6; February 24, 2000, Elizabeth Bukowski, "Seamus Heaney Tackles Beowulf," p. A16; March 10, 2000, "Slaying Dragons," p. W17.
• Washington Post Book World, January 6, 1980; January 25, 1981; May 20, 1984; January 27, 1985; August 19, 1990.
• Washington Times, November 29, 1998, p. 6; February 6, 2000, p. 8; June 9, 2002, p. B08.
• World Literature Today, summer, 1977; autumn, 1981; summer, 1983; autumn, 1996, p. 963; summer, 1999, p. 534; autumn, 2000, p. 247; winter, 2001, p. 119; winter, 2002, p. 110.

Raymond Henry Williams

 Raymond Henry Williams
(31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone^[1] and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.

World War II

Williams interrupted his education to serve in World War II. In winter 1940, he enlisted in the British Army, but stayed at Cambridge to take his exams in June 1941, the same month Germany invaded Russia. Joining the military was against the Communist party line at the time. According to Williams, his membership in the Communist Party lapsed without him ever formally resigning.^[9]
When Williams joined the army, he was assigned to the Royal Corps of Signals, which was the typical assignment for university undergraduates. He received some initial training in military communications, but was then reassigned to artillery and anti-tank weapons. He was viewed as officer material and served as an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division, 1941–1945, being sent into the early fighting in the Invasion of Normandy after the Normandy Landings (D-Day). In Politics and Letters he writes, "I don't think the intricate chaos of that Normandy fighting has ever been recorded".^[10] He commanded a unit of four tanks and mentions losing touch with two of them during fighting against Waffen-SS Panzer forces in the Bocage; he never discovered what happened to them due to a withdrawal of the troops.
He was part of the fighting from Normandy in 1944 through Belgium and Holland to Germany in 1945, where he was involved in the liberation of one of the smaller Nazi concentration camps, which was afterwards used to detain SS officers. He was also shocked to find that Hamburg had suffered saturation bombing by the Royal Air Force, not just of military targets and docks as they had been told.

Early publications

He made his reputation with Culture and Society, published in 1958, which was an immediate success. This was followed in 1961 by The Long Revolution. Williams's writings were taken up by the New Left and received a wide readership. He was also well known as a regular book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian newspaper. His years in adult education were an important experience and Williams was always something of an outsider at Cambridge University. Asked to contribute to a book called My Cambridge, he began his essay by saying, "It was never my Cambridge. That was clear from the start".[1

Novels

• Border Country, London, Chatto and Windus, 1960. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.
• Second Generation, London, Chatto and Windus, 1964; reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.
• The Volunteers, London, Eyre-Methuen, 1978. Paperback edition, London, Hogarth Press, 1985.
• The Fight for Manod, London, Chatto and Windus, 1979. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.
• Loyalties, London, Chatto and Windus, 1985.
• People of the Black Mountains, Volume 1: The Beginning, London, Chatto and Windus, 1989.
• People of the Black Mountains, Volume 2: The Eggs of the Eagle, London, Chatto and Windus, 1990.

• Drama

• Koba (1966) in Modern Tragedy, London, Chatto and Windus
• A Letter from the Country, BBC Television, April 1966, Stand, 12(1971), pp17–34
• Public Enquiry, BBC Television, 15 March 1967, Stand, 9 (1967), pp15–53

• Short stories

• Red Earth, Cambridge Front, no. 2 (1941)
• Sack Labourer, in English Short Story 1, W. Wyatt (ed.) London, Collins, 1941
• Sugar, in R. Williams, M. Orrom, M.J. Craig (eds) Outlook: a Selection of Cambridge Writings, Cambridge, 1941, pp. 7–14.
• This Time, in New Writing and Daylight, no. 2, 1942-3, J. Lehmann (ed.) London, Collins, 1943, pp. 158–64.
• A Fine Room to be Ill In, in English Story 8, W. Wyatt (ed.) London, 1948.
•  
•  

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.  During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.  Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.  From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969  This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above
.Major Works

Main article: Ernest Hemingway bibliography

• The Torrents of Spring (1926)
• The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• To Have and Have Not (1937)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• Islands in the Stream (1970, posthumous)
• The Garden of Eden (1986, posthumous)
• True at First Light (1999, posthumous)

Alexander Pope

Pope was born to Alexander Pope (1646–1717), a linen merchant of Plough Court, Lombard Street, London, and his wife Edith (née Turner) (1643–1733), who were both Catholics.^[3] Edith's sister Christiana was the wife of the famous miniature painter Samuel Cooper. Pope's education was affected by the recently enacted Test Acts, which upheld the status of the established Church of England and banned Catholics from teaching, attending a university, voting, or holding public office on pain of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt, and went to Twyford School in about 1698/99.^[3] He then went to two Catholic schools in London.^[3] Such schools, while illegal, were tolerated in some areas.^[4]
In May, 1709, Pope's Pastorals was published in the sixth part of Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies. This brought Pope instant fame, and was followed by An Essay on Criticism, published in May 1711, which was equally well received.
Around 1711, Pope made friends with Tory writers John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell and John Arbuthnot, who together formed the satirical Scriblerus Club. The aim of the club was to satirise ignorance and pedantry in the form of the fictional scholar Martinus Scriblerus. He also made friends with Whig writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In March 1713, Windsor Forest was published to great acclaim.^[4]

Later life and works

The Imitations of Horace followed (1733–38). These were written in the popular Augustan form of the "imitation" of a classical poet, not so much a translation of his works as an updating with contemporary references. Pope used the model of Horace to satirise life under George II, especially what he regarded as the widespread corruption tainting the country under Walpole's influence and the poor quality of the court's artistic taste.
Pope also added a wholly original poem, An Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, as an introduction to the "Imitations". It reviews his own literary career and includes the famous portraits of Lord Hervey ("Sporus") and Addison ("Atticus"). In 1738 he wrote the Universal Prayer.<sup>[16]

His Mjor Works</sup>

• 1711: An Essay on Criticism^[23]
• 1712: Messiah
• 1712: The Rape of the Lock (enlarged in 1714)^[23]
• 1713: Windsor Forest^[23]
• 1715–1720: Translation of the Iliad^[23]
• 1717: Eloisa to Abelard^[23]
• 1717: Three Hours After Marriage, with others
• 1717: Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady^[23]
• 1723–1725: The Works of Shakespear, in Six Volumes
• 1725–1726: Translation of the Odyssey^[23]
• 1727: Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry
• 1728: The Dunciad^[23]
• 1733–1734: Essay on Man^[23]
• 1735: The Prologue to the Satires (see the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?)

DONNE AS A METAPHYSICAL POET

DONNE AS A METAPHYSICAL POET

 Dryden expressed the view that “Donne affects the metaphysics” taking his cue from this statement, Dr. Johnson described Donne and his followers as the metaphysical poets. Ben Johnson followed classical rules and being a classicist, was a champion of decorum, discipline, symmetry and regularity, so he was not in favor of the bold liberty taken up by Donne. But he appreciated Donne as well for revolting against Petrarchan Conventions. According to Dr. Johnson, the metaphysical poets were men of learning; the displayed an abundance of wit, if will be defined as a combination of dissimilar ideas. They ransacked nature and art for illustrations, comparisons and allusions. Johnson used the word, Metaphysical for Donne’s poetry in a rather contemptuous sense, even though much of what is said applies to Donne’s work. The wit of a metaphysical poet is more intellectual than that of the Elizabethan poets in general. his conceits are psychological, his lyrics are argumentative but the greatest achievement of a metaphysical poet is a blend of passion and thought. Intense emotional intellectuality is a leading quality of a metaphysical verse. In brief, the term, “Metaphysical Poetry” implies the qualities of complexity, fusion of emotions, outburst of passions and emotional intellectuality and an embodiment of reflective elements.

Qualities of Donne (‘s poetry) as a poet:  Intellect and wit are the two prime qualities of a metaphysical poet. The poet interweaves these two elements with its emotional effects. Donne was a classical representative of this kind of poetry. He was a man whose instinct compelled him to bring the whole of experience into his verse. When we speak of Donne as a metaphysical poet, we generally have in mind the combination of passion and thought which characterize his work. His conceits are witty, his hyperboles are outrageous and his paradoxes astonishing. His mixes fact and fancy in an astounding manner. All these qualities need to be illustrated from his poems. The Good-Marrow is a poem of passion, but its intellectual quality is less obvious. The poem proves that the poet and the beloved are passionately in love. Each one is a world to the other. These lovers can never die because they love each other with equal intensity. Donne was the first poet who included thought and idea in poetry side by side as opposed to the Elizabethans. Originality in diction marks Donne’s poetry. He used scientific, technical as well as colloquial vocabulary. He rejected the conventional Petrarchan conceits and coined new images. His vocabulary is rich and diversified. He is the first poet who has delineated ecstatic joy of fulfilled love in the Sun Rising. We see originality, novelty and complexity so abundant no where but in Donne’s poetry.

The main aspects of the Metaphysical poetry are: Passionate thinking, Philosophical concept of the universe and ordinary experiences, obscurity and learning, unified sensibility, conceits and images, Affectation and Hyperbole, Diction and versification and excessive intellectualism. All these features of metaphysical poetry are abundant in Donne’s poetry for which he is labeled as a metaphysical poet.

Donne is a metaphysical poet in a literal sense too. He speaks of the soul and of spiritual love. Air and Angles is a metaphysical poem in this sense. In A Valediction and Forbidding Mourning, the poet speaks of the spiritual love. The love is so refined that the lovers do not much miss each other’s eyes, lips and hands which lovers normally seek. In the Relic, they do not even know the difference of sex. Donne deserves the title, Metaphysical also because of his obscurity which is sometimes terrible. His concentration, expanded epigrams, fondness for conceits and striking and subtle wit, combination of passion and thought, the use of common language and the profundity of thought and intensity are the qualities that make Donne a metaphysical poet. 

 

Slected Love Poems :

 

 *The Good-morrow

*The Sun Rising 

*The Extasie 

* The Relicque