Ireland’s Seamus Heaney: (March 25) Selected Poems

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), was a native of rural County Derry in Northern Ireland, where he grew up in a three room traditional thatched farmstead. His childhood, he claimed, existed in “suspension between the archaic and the modern.”

His early work is rooted in that Irish landscape. In exploring themes of nature and history, Heaney seeks moral truths in the complexity of the human condition. He is a gifted storyteller, an Irish seanchai, a cultural emissary whose stories carry the values of his homeland. The poems’ warmth, musicality, simplicity of expression and emotional depth reveal the poet’s grace and intelligence.

In his 1995 speech to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney explained that he sought to write poetry true to the external realities of rural life and “sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being.” The great American poet Robert Lowell regarded Seamus Heaney as “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.”

Many of the poems considered in this course can be found online and/or in “Opened Ground, Selected Poems,” which is widely available. (The class will focus on his early poems and not the more political works concerning The Troubles.)

Mary Murphy, Ph.D., received her doctorate in English and American Literature from New York University. Her expertise is in the 19^th-century American novel. Newport artists and writers are an area of interest as are classic films. Mary taught English at the university level for many years before retiring to Newport.