“... as a language we possess ‘more deeply and sonorously than most of the English themselves’, as Seamus Heaney said of Derek Walcott. One language has gone, and that means that the one we use now could fade too, slip and fail, as Mrs Rooney in Beckett’s All That Fall points out to Mr Rooney when he says ‘sometimes one would think you were struggling ...”

“... the basis of ‘an important affinity’ between Marvell and the ‘gifted group of Ulster poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon’ – poets surely very unlike the Member of Parliament for Hull. He asserts that ‘many of these are creatively grateful to Marvell,’ and then suggests, even more extravagantly, that ‘it is ...”

“... reminiscent of the work of Ted Hughes, where they illustrate the ‘simple beingthereness’, as Seamus Heaney once described it, ‘of sea, stone, wind and tree’. There are other Hughesian influences with which it noticeably chimes. Take, for instance, the Crow-ishness of the following: I peeped out and saw myself sitting like a stone in the rain ...”

“... a spirited defence of Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ against tut-tutting readings by Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney. On the charge of anti-semitism he is implacable, even reprieving the passage in After Strange Gods about too many ‘free-thinking Jews’ being ‘undesirable in a Christian society’. It would be repressive of Jews, in Donoghue’s ...”

“... his translation of Beowulf in the late 1940s; it was first published in 1952. Recent versions by Seamus Heaney and Michael Alexander might have made the need for the republication of Morgan’s less urgent for anyone who just wants to get hold of a good modern Beowulf, but as an early and defining Morgan poem it remains indispensable. First of all, the ...”

“... the ploughshare and the stumbling team.’Later poets have followed in Thomas’s footsteps. When Seamus Heaney was commissioned to write a poem to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, he remade ‘As the team’s head-brass’ as the story of a soldier’s homecoming. His poem, too, was to serve as a valediction: ‘In a ...”

“... wrote Bowers a letter in which he explained that the theft was an oversight, and that Bowers and Seamus Heaney were his two favourite poets. He claimed to be living in Japan, but had in fact simply sent his letter to a friend in Japan who had posted it from there. He enclosed a money order for $100, and apologised for ‘embracing and proliferating your ...”

“... the others were young local women. The INLA called them ‘consorts’. Everyone understood what Seamus Heaney described as ‘the exact/and tribal, intimate revenge’. In the 1970s republican paramilitaries used to tar and feather women deemed ‘soldier dolls’. There’s film of a British television journalist reporting on one attack in Derry in ...”

“... radical 1960s ideas of valuing individuals and encouraging self-expression and confidence. But, as Seamus Heaney put it, striving to write well helps tune the ear to the hum of a writer. It can illuminate how language works and how stories carry meaning. Digging into the archaeology of a story, into the structure of a passage, these students are like ...”

“... of routine by rotation,’ or ‘setting snares of sticky sticks’. Perhaps he is aiming at a Seamus Heaney-like tactility, but the result is often distractingly off-key. Fallon hits the quintessential translation problem of ‘sameness and difference’ when he comes to the society of the bees in Book 4. Every schoolchild now knows that the crucial ...”

“... monastic lands of Lough Derg. Station Island in the lake is a site of pilgrimage for Catholics – Seamus Heaney set a sequence of poems there involving dreamlike encounters with souls of the dead. Johnston and his father used to maintain the boats that ferry the pilgrims to and from the island. ‘Mind you it was a cold station,’ he says. ‘I was ...”

“... and innovative as that of any previous period.’ A shared perception of Bellow, Pynchon, Orton, Heaney, Fowles and Vonnegut as men of the moment or at least of the decade gives a common tone to the critiques of Bradbury and his team, and the slim volumes of the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series interact as the chapters of the Pelican Guide fail to do. But ...”

“... poetry, obliquely or disguised, which was the way Ashbery treated personal or emotional material. Seamus Heaney, who mistrusted and disliked Ashbery’s poetry, wrote of it rather caustically as ‘a centrally heated daydream … sorrowful [because] it knows that it’s inadequate’. Heaney wasn’t alone in ...”

“... like the Creggan estate, for Catholics to experience a fierce attachment to the place – in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, to a ‘land possessed and repossessed’? History is drawn in, and the eccentric story of Erskine Childers is set against his son’s Presidency of the Republic. Yet Bailey is surprised to find how remote history becomes, even the ...”

“... to ironise them). It’s the oldest daily newspaper in the United Kingdom and it belongs to what Seamus Heaney has called the ‘golden age’ of Belfast, when liberal and republican Ulster Presbyterians eagerly followed the American and French Revolutions, and many of them gave their lives in the Uprising they mounted in 1798. Now that paper proclaims ...”