Nobel Poet at Whitman
Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel Prize winner for literature, gave a reading of his
poetry at Whitman College February 5. Heaney has been called the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats.
In awarding Heaney the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy praised him for his subtle and profound approach to the violence in his native Northern Ireland and "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Born in County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939, Heaney was raised in a world torn by religious hostility and sectarian violence. He attended St. Columb's College and Queens University in Belfast. In the early 1970s, during the worst period of violence in Northern Ireland, Heaney moved with his wife and children to Glanmore, Co. Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland and then to Dublin.
His first book of poems, Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1966. Since then, he has published 11 volumes of poetry, four books of essays, and a play. His 1996 volume of poems, The Spirit Level, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His latest book is Opened Ground.
Heaney was invited to Whitman as the Walt Whitman lecturer. The event was sponsored by the English department, the Mabel L. Groseclose Lectureship fund, and the presidentıs office.
