Word: heaneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lamont to Commencement 2000, he’s enriched the University with hundreds of appearances over the years—an effort he extended last Thursday with the kickoff to his October lecture and reading series. Red-faced, squinty-eyed and with a rich Irish accent, the affable Heaney delivered to a capacity crowd at Jefferson Hall on “Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven: How Some Poems Got Written.” What began as a highly anecdotal speech about the process of composition became an earnest defense of poetry and the arts in the face of world conflict...
It’s often said that good writing captures the poetry and rhythm of everyday life, and Heaney agrees that poets must pay attention to the immediacy of every action. The famous last line of his 1967 poem “Bogland”—“the wet centre is bottomless”—came to mind as he was pulling on a pair of trousers...
...preceding the words and animating them is above all what Heaney calls “poetic emotion.” Since a poem has no will of its own, it’s a poets job to breathe life into it; this is not done by reflecting upon emotion or trying to recapture it “in tranquillity,” but by understanding the writing itself as a wholly new and active experience. Hence, ventures Heaney, writing begins with starting points like Yeats’ exaltation, Dickinson’s interior journeying or T.S. Eliot?...
Whence the inspiration? It shouldn’t be hard to find, with life as rich and complex as it is. Contrary to what Harold Bloom has called “anxiety of influence,” Heaney proposes instead the “buoyancy of influence”: the dynamism of an old poem, with its wealth of experience, should offer something to get the young poet going...
...much of his own writing, Heaney returns to County Derry and his childhood on an Irish farm, to those “long forgotten and suddenly remembered places.” For instance, the foci of his poem “Lightenings,” which became the night’s case study in composition, are the recalled image of a beggar on a threshold, Heaney’s feeling that the world had become “unroofed” after his parents’ deaths and his memories of playing marbles as a child. Mix thoughtfully...