Seamus Heaney
Born
in Castledawson, County Derry, Ireland
April 13, 1939
Died
August 30, 2013
Genre
Influences
Geoffrey Chaucer, Lord Byron, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley
...more
|
Opened Ground
—
published
1996
—
25 editions
|
|
|
Death of a Naturalist
—
published
1966
—
29 editions
|
|
|
Selected Poems, 1966-1987
—
published
1990
—
29 editions
|
|
|
The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone
by
—
published
2004
—
25 editions
|
|
|
North
—
published
1975
—
24 editions
|
|
|
100 Poems
|
|
|
Human Chain
—
published
2010
—
30 editions
|
|
|
Field Work: Poems
—
published
1979
—
28 editions
|
|
|
District and Circle
—
published
2006
—
23 editions
|
|
|
The Spirit Level
—
published
1996
—
35 editions
|
|
“If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.”
― Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
― Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
“Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.”
―
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.”
―
“It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.”
― Beowulf
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.”
― Beowulf
Polls
The best winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Han Kang (2024)
Sully Prudhomme (1901)
Gabriel García Márquez (1982)
Toni Morrison (1993)
Jon Fosse (2023)
Annie Ernaux (2022)
Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)
Rudyard Kipling (1907)
Albert Camus (1957)
José Saramago (1998)
Bob Dylan (2016)
Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea) (1954)
Orhan Pamuk (2006)
Samuel Beckett (1969)
Olga Tokarczuk (2018)
Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021)
John Steinbeck (1962)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1964)
Theodor Mommsen (A History of Rome) (1902)
George Bernard Shaw (1925)
Seamus Heaney (1995)
Henri Bergson (1927)
Louise Glück (2020)
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905)
Rabindranath Tagore (1913)
Hermann Hesse (1946)
Naguib Mahfouz (1988)
Elfriede Jelinek (2004)
László Krasznahorkai (2025)
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1903)
Selma Lagerlöf (1909)
Romain Rolland (1915)
W.B. Yeats (1923)
T.S. Eliot (1948)
Bertrand Russell (1950)
Odysseas Elytis (1979)
Gao Xingjian (2000)
Herta Müller (2009)
Svetlana Alexievich (2015)
Sigrid Undset (1928)
William Faulkner (1949)
Juan Ramón Jiménez (1956)
Yasunari Kawabata (1968)
Patrick White (1973)
Saul Bellow (1976)
Joseph Brodsky (1987)
Wisława Szymborska (1996)
Mario Vargas Llosa (2010)
Peter Handke (2019)
Frédéric Mistral (1904)
Giosuè Carducci (1906)
Maurice Maeterlinck (1911)
Karl Gjellerup (1917)
Henrik Pontoppidan (1917)
Knut Hamsun (Growth of the Soil) (1920)
Anatole France (1921)
Jacinto Benavente (1922)
Sinclair Lewis (1930)
John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga) (1932)
Luigi Pirandello (1934)
Frans Emil Sillanpää (1939)
Pär Lagerkvist (1951)
Winston Churchill (1953)
Halldór Laxness (1955)
Boris Pasternak (1958)
Ivo Andrić (1961)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970)
Pablo Neruda (1971)
Eugenio Montale (1975)
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)
Czesław Miłosz (1980)
William Golding (1983)
Jaroslav Seifert (1984)
Günter Grass (1999)
Alice Munro (2013)
Patrick Modiano (2014)
José Echegaray (1904)
Paul Heyse (1910)
Carl Spitteler (Olympian Spring) (1919)
Władysław Stanisław Reymont (The Peasants) (1924)
Grazia Deledda (1926)
Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931)
Eugene O'Neill (1936)
Roger Martin du Gard (The Thibaults) (1937)
Pearl S. Buck (1938)
Johannes V. Jensen (1944)
Gabriela Mistral (1945)
André Gide (1947)
François Mauriac (1952)
Salvatore Quasimodo (1959)
Saint-John Perse (1960)
George Seferis (1963)
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967)
Eyvind Johnson (1974)
Harry Martinson (1974)
Vicente Aleixandre (1977)
Elias Canetti (1981)
Claude Simon (1985)
Camilo José Cela (1989)
Octavio Paz (1990)
Derek Walcott (1992)
Kenzaburō Ōe (1994)
V.S. Naipaul (2001)
Imre Kertész (2002)
J.M. Coetzee (2003)
Doris Lessing (2007)
Tomas Tranströmer (2011)
Rudolf Christoph Eucken (1908)
Gerhart Hauptmann (1912)
Verner von Heidenstam (1916)
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1933)
Mikhail Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don) (1965)
S.Y. Agnon (1966)
Nelly Sachs (1966)
Heinrich Böll (1972)
Wole Soyinka (1986)
Nadine Gordimer (1991)
Dario Fo (1997)
Harold Pinter (2005)
J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008)
Mo Yan (2012)
Topics Mentioning This Author
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| History is Not Bo...: Historical Person Game | 363 | 389 | Jul 05, 2010 05:49PM | |
| College Students! : Fall/Winter 2010-2011 Leaderboard & Completed Tasks (1/5 updated) | 206 | 180 | Feb 27, 2011 05:24PM | |
| Book Nook Cafe: What I read in July 2011 | 163 | 93 | Aug 26, 2011 05:39PM | |
| Chicks On Lit: Audio Reading of the Classics | 21 | 56 | Nov 03, 2011 06:03AM | |
| Crazy Challenge C...: Tatum's Reading and Challenge List | 48 | 61 | Mar 24, 2012 08:10AM | |
| You'll love this ...: Reviewing 2012 | 74 | 90 | Jan 06, 2013 08:16AM | |
| All Things Medieval: Beowulf | 10 | 45 | Feb 10, 2013 01:18PM | |
| Classics for Begi...: Louise's Classics | 16 | 111 | Apr 28, 2013 08:34AM | |
The Seasonal Read...:
Spring Challenge 2013 Completed Tasks - DO NOT DELETE ANY POSTS IN THIS TOPIC!
|
2808 | 780 | May 31, 2013 09:02PM |





























