North

Description

In North Seamus Heaney found a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland - its people, history and landscape. Here the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He grew up in the country, on a farm, in touch with a traditional rural way of life, which he wrote about in his first book Death of a Naturalist (1966). He attended the local school and in 1951 went as a boarder to St Columb's College, about 40 miles away in Derry (the poem 'Singing School' in North refers to this period of his life). In 1956 he went on a scholarship to Queen's University, Belfast and graduated with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1961. After a year as a post-graduate at a college of education, and a year teaching in a secondary modern school in Ballymurphy, he was appointed to the staff of St Joseph's College of Education. In 1966 Seamus Heaney took up a lecturing post in the English Department of Queen's University, and remained there until 1972, spending the academic year 1970-71 as a visiting Professor at the University of California in Berkeley.

[Heaney's] awareness of a wider social world . . . reaches its culmination in "North" (1975), a deservedly famous volume that [Helen] Vendler regards as 'one of the crucial poetic interventions of the 20th century, ' ranking with Eliot's "Prufrock," Wallace Stevens' "Harmonium," and Frost's "North of Boston" in 'its key role in the history of modern poetry.' "Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"" "[Heaney's] awareness of a wider social world . . . reaches its culmination in North (1975), a deservedly famous volume that [Helen] Vendler regards as 'one of the crucial poetic interventions of the 20th century, ' ranking with Eliot's Prufrock, Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, and Frost's North of Boston in 'its key role in the history of modern poetry.'" --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "[Heaney's] awareness of a wider social world . . . reaches its culmination in "North" (1975), a deservedly famous volume that [Helen] Vendler regards as 'one of the crucial poetic interventions of the 20th century, ' ranking with Eliot's "Prufrock," Wallace Stevens' "Harmonium," and Frost's "North of Boston" in 'its key role in the history of modern poetry.'" --Michiko Kakutani, " The New York Times" "YHeaney's awareness of a wider social world . . . reaches its culmination in "North" (1975), a deservedly famous volume that YHelen Vendler regards as 'one of the crucial poetic interventions of the 20th century, ' ranking with Eliot's "Prufrock," Wallace Stevens' "Harmonium," and Frost's "North of Boston" in 'its key role in the history of modern poetry.'" --Michiko Kakutani," The New York Times"