Word: heaneys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Academy likes to invest some geopolitical significance in its literature awards, and the current peace talks in Northern Ireland seem to have influenced this year's decision. Among the reasons cited for choosing Heaney: "As an Irish Catholic, he has concerned himself with analysis of violence in Northern Ireland--with the express reservation that he wants to avoid the conventional terms...
That reservation has made all the difference in his art. It is hard to imagine a less overtly political poet than Heaney, 56, or one who has more thoroughly purged his language of the commonplace and banal. "Poetry is more a threshold than a path," he once wrote. From his first published volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), onward, he has produced intense, lyrical works that seem suspended between contradictions--life and death, joy and grief, memory and loss. His imagery is radical, in the true, etymological sense of that word: "The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch...
Such sensations were Heaney's birthright. The oldest of nine children, he was raised on Mossbawn, the family farm some 30 miles northwest of Belfast. A Protestant estate adjoined the Catholic Heaneys' land. "I was symbolically placed," he said later, "between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between 'the demesne' and 'the bog.' The demesne was walled, wooded, beyond our ken; the bog was rushy and treacherous, no place for children...
...Heaney left the farm to study English at Queen's University of Belfast, and then to teach. As his poetry began to attract attention and praise, a succession of academic posts beckoned; between 1989 and 1994, he was both the professor of poetry at Oxford and the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. And he attracted hordes of acolytes and admirers along the way, a bearish, affable bard equally at ease in faculty room...
...childhood farm--his grounding in the earth--has never left Heaney or his poems: "As a child, they could not keep me from wells/ And old pumps with buckets and windlasses." His recurring metaphor for the act of writing poetry is digging, into the past, into the literal Irish bogs where old friends and enemies lie buried and preserved...