Featured New Authors
Featured Author: Seamus Heaney
Featured Author: Seamus Heaney
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
In This Feature
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 Caroline Forbes/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Seamus Heaney |
(1967)
“Heaney writes poetry that is urbane, accomplished, predictable. He also has been struck by violence and by ugliness. . . . But the ugliness is undercut by wit, a wit that is sometimes heavy-handed.”
(1976)
“Heaney, to my mind the best poet now writing in Ireland, seems the only one of his generation not in some way inhibited by the shadow of Yeats.”
(1979)
“. . . a superb book, the most eloquent and far-reaching book he has written, a perennial poetry offered at a time when many of us have despaired of seeing such a thing.”
(1980)
“As a prose writer, Mr. Heaney has a nimble, elegant charm and the ability to rise suddenly, at his best, from conventional ideas to home truths.”
(1984)
“[This] translation of the medieval Irish work ‘Buile Suibhne,’ shows that Seamus Heaney’s imagination is continuing to deepen in intensity and range.”
(1987)
“Some half a dozen poems here signal a new direction . . . [They] show Mr. Heaney experimenting, enlarging his powers of invention . . .”
(1989)
“What is valuable in ‘The Government of the Tongue’ is not a line of argument, but the reminder on every page of the nonliterary world in which literature exists.”
(1990)
“He has done well to prune his earlier collections and expunge some of the more necrophiliac encounters between poet and beloved bog. He has retained his best poems . . .”
(1992)
“. . . a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven.”
(1995)
“. . . a meditation on the uses of art and power, a fresh and astute defense of poetry against any attempt to reduce it to a relevant or useful commodity.”
(1998)
“. . . eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today . . .”
(2000)
“. . . a translation that manages to accomplish what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right. . . . Generations of readers will be grateful.”
(December 2, 1979)
Heaney says his upbringing in a rural area in Northern Ireland in which Protestants and Catholics lived together peacefully gave his poetry “a kind of double awareness of division.”
(March 13, 1983)
In this New York Times Magazine profile, Frances X. Clines interviewed Heaney and examined his work at a time when his reputation in America was solidifying.
(September 29, 1985)
“Symmetries and arithmetics have always tempted Italo Calvino’s imagination . . . Happily, the schema turns out to be not just a prescription; what might have been for a lesser imagination a grid acts
in this case like a springboard . . .”
(November 8, 1987)
In this appreciation, Heaney says of Joseph Brodsky, “The stylistic consequences of great poetry are to be felt in the pitch, strenuousness and concentrated vigilance with which he reads not just books, but
the world.”
(October 6, 1995)
In conferring the prize, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Heaney “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”
(October 6, 1995)
In this overview written shortly after Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize, Michiko Kakutani examines Heaney’s stylistic evolution and influences.
(October 9, 1995)
After winning the Nobel, Heaney arrived home and was welcomed not only as a great poet in a land that loves writers and writing, but also as a symbol of hope for lasting peace in Northern Ireland.
(November 24, 1998)
“Happily for the reader, the publication of ‘Opened Ground,’ a new selection of Heaney’s poems spanning the years 1966-1996 and demonstrating the consummate virtuosity of his work, coincides
with the publication of a monograph on his verse by the Harvard professor Helen Vendler, the most astute and eloquent critic of poetry at work today.”
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