Seamus Heaney Is One of the Most Popular Poets Alive Today.
Seamus Heaney Exam Question
Lewis Alcorn 5T
Seamus Heaney is one of the most popular poets alive today. Discuss and explain why you think this is so. Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney currently lives in Dublin. Heaney taught at Harvard University from 1985 to 2006, where he was a Visiting Professor, and then Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University (1985-1997) and Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence (1998-2006). Heaney has attracted a readership in several countries and has won prestigious literary awards and honours, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".
In fact, his books make up two thirds of sales of living poets in the UK today. Robert Lowell, a successful American poet, called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age". Blake Morrison, a British author, poet and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, once noted in his work Seamus Heaney, “The author is "that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with 'the common reader.’”
Part of Heaney's popularity, in my opinion anyway, stems from his subject matter; the Troubles in Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule, something which I personally find very interesting. The Troubles are a very personal thing in Ireland, something which, in my view, Heaney captures magically. Almost everyone in Northern Ireland, and most people in the Republic as well, has a direct link to the Troubles, either they have a relative, a neighbour, a friend, an acquaintance or a friend of a friend, that was directly or indirectly affected by the Troubles. Heaney also had a direct link to the Troubles and as
Lewis Alcorn 5T
Seamus Heaney is one of the most popular poets alive today. Discuss and explain why you think this is so. Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney currently lives in Dublin. Heaney taught at Harvard University from 1985 to 2006, where he was a Visiting Professor, and then Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University (1985-1997) and Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence (1998-2006). Heaney has attracted a readership in several countries and has won prestigious literary awards and honours, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".
In fact, his books make up two thirds of sales of living poets in the UK today. Robert Lowell, a successful American poet, called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age". Blake Morrison, a British author, poet and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, once noted in his work Seamus Heaney, “The author is "that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with 'the common reader.’”
Part of Heaney's popularity, in my opinion anyway, stems from his subject matter; the Troubles in Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule, something which I personally find very interesting. The Troubles are a very personal thing in Ireland, something which, in my view, Heaney captures magically. Almost everyone in Northern Ireland, and most people in the Republic as well, has a direct link to the Troubles, either they have a relative, a neighbour, a friend, an acquaintance or a friend of a friend, that was directly or indirectly affected by the Troubles. Heaney also had a direct link to the Troubles and as