Seamus Heaney Books In Order

Collections

  1. Preoccupations (1980)
  2. From the Republic of Conscience (2009)

Non fiction

  1. The Fire I’ the Flint (1975)
  2. Makings of a Music (1978)
  3. The Government of the Tongue (1988)
  4. The Redress of Poetry (1990)
  5. Ireland (1992)
  6. Dylan the Durable? (1992)
  7. Crediting Poetry (1995)
  8. Conor Fallon (1996)
  9. Homage to Robert Frost (1996)
  10. Talking with Poets (2002)

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Seamus Heaney Books Overview

Preoccupations

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s first collection of prose, Preoccupations, begins with a vivid account of his early years on his father’s farm in Northern Ireland and his coming of age as a student and teacher in Belfast. Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.

The Government of the Tongue

In this volume of critical essays, Seamus Heaney scrutinizes the poetry of many masterful poets. Throughout the collection, Heaney’s gifts as a wise and genial reader are exercised with characteristic exactness, and we are reminded, above all, of the essentially gratifying nature of poetry itself.

The Redress of Poetry

Seamus Heaney defines the title of this work of criticism as follows: ‘To redress poetry is to know and celebrate it for its forcibleness as itself…
not only as a matter of profferd argument and edifying content but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul.’ Throughout this collection, Heaney’s insight and eloquence are themselves of a poetic order.

Crediting Poetry

er 10, 1995. His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as ‘the ship and the anchor’ of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

Homage to Robert Frost

In a collection of essays, three of our generation’s greatest poets explore the mythologies and misconceptions that surround one of this country’s most idolized poets.

Talking with Poets

The five interviews in this book were conducted by students in ‘The Art of Poetry,’ a course that Harry Thomas taught for several years. The students’ depth of knowledge and keenness of insight into the poets’ work is an affirmation of American education. The poets respond to the students with a frankness and feeling of fraternity that mounts at times to a sort of communion. The poets take up a great range of matters in the interviews the nature of artistic creation, the varieties and difficulties of poetic translation, poetry and politics, religion, popular culture, the contemporary readership for poetry, and the experience of living as a poet in a country not your own. They speak with familiarity and enthusiasm of a number of writers, including Eliot, Joyce, Rilke, Brodsky, Pound, Ovid, Dante, Ralegh, Wordsworth, Keats, Mandelstam, and Wilde. One of the delights of reading these interviews is to observe the poets responding to some matter for instance Seamus Heaney speaking of Robert Pinsky’s translation of Czeslaw Milosz’s great poem, ‘The World,’ and Robert Pinsky speaking at length of Seamus Heaney’s essay, in his book THE GOVERNMENT Of THE TONGUE, on Pinsky’s translation. This is an intimate look into the minds of five of our most celebrated contemporary poets and an invigorating meditation on some of our most human concerns.

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