Search Results

“... or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature of its structure. Thus a poem could be read in the same way by a student in Kenya, at ...”

“... was too distant, and the world that grew out of it too interesting and close and dramatic. As Seamus Deane writes in Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, the literature and the politics of the Irish Revival achieved ‘the remarkable feat of ignoring the Famine and rerouting the claim for cultural exceptionalism ...”

“... sort of historico-spiritualist hocus-pocus Yeats was so fond of. For them Yeats becomes the figure Seamus Heaney invokes in a moment of devil’s advocacy, representing ‘the reliable citizen’: ‘this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolemaic astrology’. I don’t disagree about the swagger and the ...”

“... cleverest.’ He never became resentable to readers, either at home or abroad. Poets liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of ...”