Seamus Heaney - In Memoriam

Seamus Heaney’s death last week left a rift in our lives, and in poetry, that won’t easily be mended. A Nobel Laureate, a devoted...

Being with Seamus Heaney was like being with two people at once. On the one hand, he was noble, statesmanlike, slightly formidable: that monumental head could happily have taken its place among the classical emperors that ring the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. On the other, with his shambling gait, unruly hair and bred-in-the-bone jocundity, he remained always the farmer’s son from Co. Derry.

I met him first nearly 20 years ago, when I interviewed him for Harpers & Queenon the publication of "Seeing Things". He spoke about the duty he felt to respond to letters from admirers, and of how this maddened his wife—"Marie always says, 'For God’s sake!', but the relationship between one’s ethical commands and one’s whole reality is very complex." He reflected on the need sometimes for a poet to be political, and stern: "Sometimes it’s immoral not to put the boot in and cause a bit of bother; sometimes acquiescence is a failure." He mused on his Catholic upbringing which—though he was no longer a churchgoer—had left him feeling he had "a right to joy".

The Nobel Laureate has died at the age of 74.

In Seamus Heaney's poetry, ordinary objects and places – a sofa, a satchel, the sound of rain – are sanctified. But it has edge and politics, too.

Arion Press remembers and pays tribute to Seamus Heaney (1939-2013).

As the world laments the death of its great poet Seamus Heaney, Arion Press remembers with gratitude the man we came to know in the course of publishing two of his books. How fortunate that his collection Stone from Delphi was completed last December...

The singer and songwriter Paul Simon admires the musicality of Seamus Heaney, who died on Friday.

There is a world of difference between Seamus Heaney's home town of Bellaghy and the genteel Strand Road in Dublin 4, where he lived since 1976 with his wife Marie and their two sons Mi

They came as friends, contemporaries or simply admirers.

In decades of lyrical compositions, the writer mastered a terrible fear magnificently.

Stephen Burt says the Nobel laureate found fame writing poems of Ireland's Troubles, of burials and ploughs--before finding new greatness as a poet of joy, writing for the world

Digging Seamus Heaney in my Brooklyn classroom and around the world

The world feels heavier somehow today with the passing of Seamus Heaney. In times like these when there are rumblings of bombings and desolation, one feels blessed to have known a poet who knew all about troubles, political and social, but also who dug into the personal in unearthing the human condition.

It is no accident that Seamus Heaney’s selected poems is titled “Opened Ground,” since writing poems for this most remarkable farm boy was a kind of digging: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug...

Regardless of a poem’s subject, there are continuities in Seamus Heaney’s work, including an awareness of mortality and the precariousness of life.

Seamus Heaney wasn't just one of the greatest Irish poets of the last couple of centuries. He was also a man who was visibly comfortable in his own skin in a province and an age where a

There is one photograph on the busy mantelpiece of my childhood home that stands out from the rest. Among the usual family snaps of weddings, babies, First Holy Communion and first days

In the late '90s, for five years, I taught at Harvard as a lecturer in the Department of English, where Seamus Heaney was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Soon after my arrival, he invited me to dinner at the Dolphin, a little seafood restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, which he liked. He said it was to be a “social evening, not a command performance,” knowing I would be nervous, and on a Tuesday after our classes, we met in the lobby of the Faculty Club to walk the few blocks to the Dolphin. 

In 1996, I asked Seamus Heaney if he could please send me a poem for a new magazine to be called  “Slate.” It was a weird request, it took some trust on his part.

(RNS) The disappearance of Irish poet Seamus Heaney — so unexpected and jolting — left a silence and a stilled a pen. There would be no more new words.