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“... his devastating candour, stems from a wish for some concession to a more heartening position. Seamus Heaney took exception to Larkin’s remark in ‘Aubade’ that ‘Death is no different whined at than withstood,’ and pointed at the defiance of Shakespearean characters in Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ as evidence: facing death, ‘they … do not ...”

“... think of the admonitions received from the ghost of William Carleton in Station Island (l984) by Seamus Heaney, a translator of Dante: you have to try to make sense of what comes.  Remember everything and keep your head. The attempt to make sense, and unity, out of a chaotic and divided history, is the heroic striving of O’Grady’s fine book. If ...”

“... and slightly eccentric English, as in the English versions produced by Pasternak’s sister which Seamus Heaney feels to be more authentic than a professional job. Raine and his wife Ann Pasternak-Slater have themselves provided outstanding translations for Evgeny Pasternak’s study The Tragic Years. The book has the special advantage of coming from ...”

“... is no place today where his poetry obviously lives, as there is, say, a Ted Hughes county and a Seamus Heaney land, a place domesticated by poets. Keats said that Hampstead had been ‘damned’ by Leigh Hunt, and the Lakes by Wordsworth. For Larkin elsewhere can only be completely authentic (‘a real girl in a real place’) if    I have never ...”

“... new generation of poets, dominated by the Big H brands (Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney), were prosodically and thematically more ambitious. And the cultural mood of the later decades of the 20th century was not indulgent to the perceived misogyny and Little Englandism of Larkin and Amis when biographies and editions of their ...”

“... than commentator, equally disinclined to offer blame or grant the benefit of the doubt’, is how Seamus Heaney puts it in his foreword to Haviaras’s translations. Tyrants with one mad idea in their head fascinated Cavafy. He has six poems, for example, about Julian the Apostate, a vicious fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to abolish Christianity ...”

“... of Scotland’) and enjoyed the feeling of leaving certain readers out in the cold. (Seamus Heaney expresses a similar tribal exultation in his place-name poem ‘Broagh’ over ‘that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage’.) The attraction of dialect for poets is that it conceals as well as lays open: the private or parochial ...”

“... man could be. Gillian Clarke’s voice is easily recognised. She is as secure among her themes as Seamus Heaney is: similar themes, too – weather and weathering, water-divining, children, waterfalls, skulls, curlews, calving, scything, fallen plums, falling shadows. Like Heaney, too, she has an elemental respect for ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... animal life. Philip Hobsbaum, who in his later academic career encouraged many writers, including Seamus Heaney and Alasdair Gray, got him to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Livingstone reckons influenced his political beliefs more than any other book. Raymond Rivers, his biology teacher, stimulated his lifelong enthusiasm for reptiles and ...”

“... up an echo chamber of affirmations of Johnson’s eternal appeal ranging from Ruskin to Beckett to Seamus Heaney to that American avatar of Johnson, Harold Bloom, who places Johnson’s literary criticism within the ‘ancient genre of wisdom writing’. Focusing on only a ‘portion of Johnson … the moralist and critic’ (though he could be described ...”

“... this book were she oblivious to the beauty of the place through whose ‘eye of the needle’, as Seamus Heaney puts it, Brown ‘transforms everything’. At the same time, though, her book reveals the ruthlessness of poets as they hunt for and construct an environment from which they can draw (and sometimes leech) the resources they need for their ...”

“... accuses himself of selling out: ‘I’m opening my trap/to busk the class that broke him’.Seamus Heaney, too, felt guilty about breaking with his father and forefathers and was similarly eager to pledge affiliation, his pen employed to do the work of a spade. In ‘Follower’, he writes of the way his father ‘keeps stumbling/Behind me, and ...”

“... returning student’s aspirations, and act as the catalyst of that self-discovery described by Seamus Heaney in The Redress of Poetry when he writes, ‘we go to poetry to be forwarded within ourselves’; literature, Heaney says, gives ‘an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already ...”

“... of Joyce has become almost as intense in recent years as the battle for the GPO in Easter Week. Seamus Deane and Kiberd, both of whom have edited Penguin editions of Joyce’s fiction, have made efforts to dragoon him into the soldiers of destiny. In his essay on Joyce in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Deane wrote that Joyce ‘remained, at one ...”