If you find yourself talking about nature in poetry, it is inevitable before too long that Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is going to crop up. He was a master: prolific and powerful poet, Nobel Literature Prize laureate, Oxford Professor of Poetry, versatile translator of epics, a truly prophetic voice.
So it’s good to come to him. These are not necessarily the most well known or beloved, but I like particularly them – all drawn from Faber’s posthumous anthology, New Selected Poems 1988-2013.
So here goes.
- Seamus Heaney on Wiki
- Seamus Heaney’s acceptance speech for the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature
- The text of the poems:
- The Perch
- St Kevin and the Blackbird
- In Iowa
- The Golden Bough (from Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI) is not available online
Images used in the video
- Claude (Lorrain) ca 1645: Coast View with Apollo and Cumaean Sibyl (The Hermitage, St Petersburg)
- Mosaic of the poet Virgil (Bardo Mosaic Museum, Tunis)
- Photo of Snowy Iowa road by Jsayre64
