Independent Explorations: Seamus Heaney

"Achieving critical respect and genuine popularity can be difficult at best; that Seamus Heaney managed as much, given the fractious coincidence of his poetic emergence and the deteriorating political situation in his native Northern Ireland, is nothing short of astounding. Heaney's poetry maintains universal scope as he interrogates all sides—political and personal, Catholic and Protestant—through mythological and allusive resonance ... "

"Seamus Justin Heaney (HEE-nee) is widely regarded as the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats, and indeed as one of the foremost contemporary poets in the English language. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ... "

"That every translation is also an act of interpretation has been a commonplace at least since Cicero, Horace, and Augustine of Hippo. It arises in response to the notion that the word-for-word and sense-for-sense task that aims for "faithfulness" provides at best only a partial description of all that a good translation entails ... "

"The translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, assigned to Heaney by the Norton Anthology editor, took the poet about twenty years to fulfil. Saluted as the "official", par excellence translation of Beowulf, it outshone another translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem that was published in the same year (1999) by Ray Liuzza, a Germanic Philologist ... "

"Death of a Naturalist is the first published book of poems by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and despite occasional evidence of apprenticeship, many of its poems exhibit the development of that distinctive poetic voice for which Heaney would eventually be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1995 ... "

""Follower" pays tribute to the skill of Seamus Heaney's father, a farmer who masterfully works the land to prepare it for planting; his precision allows the sod to roll "over without breaking." Such a determined struggle with the earth works as an analogy for the act of writing poetry, as the poet seeks out the seedling wealth that lies at the base of the imagination and then plots out each line of verse, "mapping the furrow exactly. ... "