Seamus heaney

1. Seamus heaney Walk on air against your better judgement

2. “…keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people.” -Prime Minister Enda Kenny April 1939 - August 2013 “The most important Irish poet since Yeats.” -Robert Lowell, poet “…works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” -The Nobel Foundation

3. Born and Raised in northern ireland

4. Spent much of his adult life in dublin, the Capital of ireland

5. Heaney was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in 1970, professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1996, was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Other awards that he received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), the T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999).[5][6] In 2011, he was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and in 2012, a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust. His literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland. (Whew!)

6. 1939: Born to a farmer/cattle dealer and housewife whose family worked in a local linen mill. Oldest of nine children. • Raised Catholic. • 1953: Brother, Christopher, killed by a car. • 1957: Began university studies in Belfast. • 1961: Graduated. • 1962: First started publishing poetry. Going back to the start… 1965

7. 1963: Becomes a lecturer. • 1965: Marries Marie Devlin, a school teacher. • 1966: First major volume, Death of a Naturalist, published. • 1966: First son born. He later had another son and a daughter. • Violence marked life in Northern Ireland, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading him to move south. Going back to the start…

8. Later in Life… • 1969: Stops reading one of his most famous poems in public so it’s not misused as propaganda. • 1982: Included in anthology of British poets and responds with famous lines of poetry --> “My passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised/to toast the Queen.” • Noted for his political poems and activism, as well as his poems about love, his family, and his beloved Ireland. • 1995: Wins Nobel Prize for Literature.

9. End of Life… • 2006: Suffers stroke and faces mortality. • By 2013: Published 12 collections of poems and was working on a 13th. • 2013: His last words were in a text message to his wife: “Nolitimere.” (Do not be afraid.) • 2013: Buried in family village with parents and brother. Epitaph is “Walk on air against your better judgement” from one of his poems.

10. Let’s look at quintessential Heaney… the stuff that cemented him in the hearts of the Irish! • We were going to spend time with work that spanned his whole life. • But the work that most scholars would say defines him as a writer is from earlier in his career. • So we’re delving into some of the poems he wrote that reveal his soul. They date from 1966-1987. • We’ll spend some time (though not as much) with a few examples of his later work. These are not included in your packet. • We’ll finish our unit with the very last poem he ever wrote. Change of plan from the syllabus