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“... and it assumes that the metropoles determine the way Standard English or French is spoken. Seamus Heaney, whose own voice had a marvellous music that became famous through the resonant recordings he made, thought about this throughout his work of criticism, and especially in an essay in Finders Keepers, in which he explores a phrase from his ...”

“... has the stamp of 1969 on it. Inevitably so in the case of Small World, a collection of the work of Seamus Deane, who died last year. The book includes two pamphlets written during the darkest period of the Troubles. ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ (1983) takes the long view, as Deane often does, arguing that the English and British authorities asserted their ...”

“... the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, who spent many hard and lonely years as a farmer, and of whom Seamus Heaney, another Irish poet with close ties to the world of the countryside, has written: ‘he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere.’ ‘I am king,’ wrote Kavanagh of himself in a beautiful poem, ‘Of banks and stones and every ...”

“... was being written off by Gunn, this poem made a considerable impression on poets as different as Seamus Heaney, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn and Les Murray, all of whom had grown up with working horses. Its impact today may be different, but its eloquence persists and the need for an environmental reset has grown more acute. Where Rilke’s ‘Archaic ...”

“... or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature of its structure. Thus a poem could be read in the same way by a student in Kenya, at ...”

“... ones whom he did. He had known and published Hughes and Plath while at Cambridge, he had published Seamus Heaney’s first poems to a wider audience at the New Statesman, he had been taught by Leavis and had fallen out with him when he went to work in London, he liked and commissioned Mary McCarthy and V.S. Pritchett and William Empson and V.S. Naipaul ...”

“... James MacGibbon’s edition followed in 1975, but it has now been out of print for twenty years. Seamus Heaney reviewed it appreciatively but apologetically: ‘Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre recognitions,’ he claimed. ‘There is a retreat from resonance, as if the spirit of A.A. Milne ...”

“... the ‘warm’ simple recollective writing – on mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts – of Seamus Heaney and some of the other Irish poets. Affection and recollection are too facile in them, making a too easy basis for a poem that may be beautifully crafted and expressed. Lowell’s later poems have by contrast the ghastly matter-of-factness of a ...”

“... do with the lives of the poets who write them. ‘Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history,’ Seamus Heaney began his wonderful Oxford lecture, ‘Dylan the Durable?’, ‘as a chapter in the history of poetry.’ In this dutifully chronological new biography it’s not obvious what Thomas was a case history of, and no real case is made for the ...”

“... see him and his work increasingly as a very frail, and sincere, fraud.’ In 1975, he wrote to Seamus Heaney about being ‘caught’ on a train by the poet Padraic Fiacc: ‘It was like being doused in soft warm shit.’ The following year, he wrote to Madeline about an event he had done, attended, he said, by ‘Shit Silkin’, i.e. the poet Jon ...”

“... later transpires they got the wrong flat.)19 August. In Karl Miller’s Tretower to Clyro Seamus Heaney keeps putting in an appearance either in person or via his poems. ‘Two Lorries’ has to do with a ‘tasty coalman’ who fancies Heaney’s mother, and another coal-hole poem, ‘Slack’, is about the ...”

“... Denison and Judi Dench do the handbag scene from The Importance, J.G. reads from De Profundis and Seamus Heaney gives the address. The congregation look sober and worthy, Gay Pride not much in evidence with the wreath laid by Thelma Holland, Wilde’s daughter-in-law, a link which vaults the century. After the congregation clears we do cutaway shots of ...”

“... but it was a meaningful comparison in a way it would not be between, say, Danielle Steele and Seamus Heaney. The scale of bestsellerdom increased sharply after the end of the First World war. The Sheikh, by the hitherto little-known Mrs E.M. Hull, appeared in 1919 and soon sold more than a million copies (the film version gave Valentino one of his ...”

“... the most remote in provenance from Billy’s may in a sense be the most germane to it. Seamus Heaney once attributed his earliest understanding of words as ‘bearers of history and mystery’ to the ‘beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC shipping forecast – Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre’. These rhythms have ...”

“... established figures.Very much so. I’d read them at school.What about people who came later on: Seamus Heaney, say?I reviewed Seamus Heaney’s first book somewhat unfavourably in the Observer. Not unfavourably, I could see he was quite good but he wasn’t that special and I said so. There’s a mocking piece ...”