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Being a big fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence Seamus Heaney, I spent much of the past three weeks hopping from lectures and readings by him to discussions about him. It was wonderful to hear him read aloud some of those poems I had only rehearsed in my head, but it was as wonderful to hear lines from his new translation of Beowulf. His wry running commentary--that the genre demanded the heroic "Charlton Heston or Clint Eastwood bit" or that he pictured the monster Grendel as a sort of "reeking dog-breath in the dark"--helped...
...famous "bog poems" by Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize-winning poet and Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet, agonizes over the problems of place and the mixed emotions of homecoming. Often compared by critics to noted expatriates (and fellow Nobel Laureates) Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, Heaney frequently writes about returning as an outsider to his homeland in Ireland. There he finds a rich heritage of language and myth, subjugated by the fear-driven assimilation of British culture forced upon Ireland with the onset of "The Troubles...
...Nobel acceptance speech on "Crediting Poetry." The latter promises to be an amazing and innovative translation of the oft-interpreted Anglo-Saxon epic, due to be published over a thousand years after the epic's initial creation at the end of the first millenium--a worthy task for a poet so critically and popularly beloved...
While in town, Heaney also fulfilled his duties as Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet by giving several lectures about, and readings from, Opened Ground and Beowulf. Heaney is known for his humorous, warm and gentle spirit, a spirit than infuses even the most violent and political of his poems, and also for his tendency to avoid the "celebrity poet" spotlight. (In fact, he was in the Greek islands when the Nobel Prize announcement was made.) This came across in Heaney's three lectures and three "talking shop" sessions (informal talk-cum-question-and-answer sessions), in which the always-congenial...
...quite a departure. Hughes? main talent lay in his powerful depiction of the savagery of nature -? the brutally Darwinian animal world, the intense reality of the English countryside -? and a mournfully steady eye for detail first praised by his mentor T.S. Eliot. He was not a natural choice for poet laureate, whose official duties include celebrating the queen?s birthday and commemorating other royal occasions. Many feared that like Wordsworth, one of his predecessors in the role, his talent and love of nature would be stifled. But Hughes sparkled. His 1997 offering, "Tales of Ovid," won the Whitbread Book...