[This entry was updated by Robert Buttel from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 142-165.] From the beginning critical as well as popular acclaim has greeted each volume of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Who would...

From the beginning critical as well as popular acclaim has greeted each volume of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Who would have predicted in 1966, when his first full-length book appeared, the impact such poetry would have? It is, after all, a poetry...

The poetry of Seamus Justin Heaney (born 1939) reveals his skill with language and his command of form and technique. In his poems, Heaney balances personal, topical, and universal themes. He approaches his themes from a modest perspective, creating...

Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker is placing her literary archive at Emory University's library.The author of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Color Purple," "By the Light of My Father's Smile" and other works visits Emory every couple of years for readings and meetings with...

For more than 40 years, the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux has been the tweedy, stubborn holdout on Union Square. Even if everything around it is changing (the Amalgamated Bank building turning condo, the new glass tower going up at the corner of 14th and...

In the mid-1980's, someone asked the late Thomas Flanagan if he'd he read Erica Jong's last novel. "I definitely hope so," he replied.He was a man of lightning wit and great learning. His first novel, The Year of the French (1979), won a National Book...

When Larry Meagher was a boy growing up in Depression-era Greenpoint, the copper steeple of St. Cecilia’s church would have been prominent on the low-slung skyline. These days, it sits in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But on the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 20,...

In the following essay, Hart determines the influence of Robert Lowell on the poems of Field Work, and praises Heaney's willingness to take risks in this volume.

In the following essay, Boly applies speech act theory to construct multiple modes of meaning and layers of reality for the main persona in Heaney's poem “Follower.”

In the following interview, Heaney discusses his poetry, especially the poems in The Haw Lantern, as well as American poets that have influenced his work.

Discusses Seamus Heaney's position as a poet within the context of his society.

Seamus Heaney is one of the greatest poets in recent years and often writes about his childhood. I believe this is because he is trying to understand his own childhood and how his early experiences affected him. This is evidenced in The Early Purges and Mid Term Break.

Contends that poetry has always been seen as reflecting and commenting on the society in which it is written. Discusses the extent to which Seamus Heaney uses his poetry to search into his society to examine his conscious regarding his moral behavior.