Word: heaneys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Swedish Academy of Letters praised as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He is the fourth Irish writer to have won the prize, joining the ranks of William Butler Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969). He is one of the most popular poets of all time (his collections, particularly North, have outsold nearly all other poetic collections in recent memory) and the author of a collection of 18 books of poetry, prose and drama...
Coming from a culturally rich but economically poor Roman Catholic farming family in Northern Ireland, a world that would pervade his early works and continues to haunt his writing, Heaney attended Queen's University, Belfast and taught at several other universities before ending up at Harvard, where he taught a poetry workshop every spring semester until he won the Nobel Prize...
...Heaney once said that of all the cities he had visited in America, Boston was the one that most reminded him of his beloved Dublin (where he moved in 1972). Perhaps that explains why Heaney chose Cambridge, his home-away-from-home, as the place where he would personally unveil his two most recent works --Opened Ground (Poems 1966-1996) and a translation-in-its-final-stages of Beowulf. The former work is a comprehensive anthology containing a large selection of poems from Heaney's previous books (up to and including 1996's The Spirit Level), several excerpts from...
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...
Indeed, it became obvious through the course of his lectures why someone with a voice like Heaney's is so obsessed with the beauty of words and their sound. A large portion of Heaney's lectures focused on his translation of Beowulf and the problems of translation and language in general. Language in all its personal, social and political uses is the main focus of almost all Heaney's poetry. Thus, his political posturing was and still is expressed through the subtleties of language (although the works from his most recent work, The Spirit Level, are infused with a political...