Irish Poetry

“...that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with 'the common reader...”

“...that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with 'the common reader...”

Blake Morrison, “Seamus Heaney”

“...the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present...”

Richard Murphy, The New York Review

The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). 

The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). 

Heaney and Brodsky poetic friendship

Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky

Seamus Heaney (1990)

I woke up to the sound of seagulls in Dublin.

At dawn their voices sounded

like souls so ruined

that they don't feel sad.

The clouds went over the sea in four tiers,

like theater towards drama,

typing in braille a postscript of rage

and helplessness in a glazed frame...

Audenesque Seamus Heaney, 1939 - 2013 in memory of Joseph Brodsky

Joseph, yes, you know the beat.
Wystan Auden’s metric feet
Marched to it, unstressed and stressed,
Laying William Yeats to rest.
Therefore, Joseph, on this day,
Yeats’s anniversary,
(Double-crossed and death-marched date,
January twenty-eight)...

Through his title and numerous allusions especially in the five opening stanzas, Seamus Heaney’s elegy on Joseph Brodsky explicitly refers to Auden’s poem on Yeats’s death as its foil and as a prototypical model elegy.One motive for the close intertextual reference of Heaney’s elegy is the coincidence that Brodsky died on the anniversary of Yeats’s death, on 28 January (1996 and 1939, respectively; 5–8). Heaney thus repeats Auden’s elegy, likewise taking the event of a fellow poet’s (and in this case, also a friend’s) death as his subject matter as well as thematizing the nature, function and potential effectiveness of poetry, in the end, however, radically altering the earlier poet’s “story” and its eventfulness.

• Through his title and numerous allusions especially in the five opening stanzas, Seamus Heaney’s elegy on Joseph Brodsky explicitly refers to Auden’s poem on Yeats’s death as its foil and as a prototypical model elegy.One motive for the close intertextual reference of Heaney’s elegy is the coincidence that Brodsky died on the anniversary of Yeats’s death, on 28 January (1996 and 1939, respectively; 5–8). Heaney thus repeats Auden’s elegy, likewise taking the event of a fellow poet’s (and in this case, also a friend’s) death as his subject matter as well as thematizing the nature, function and potential effectiveness of poetry, in the end, however, radically altering the earlier poet’s “story” and its eventfulness.