Search results for ""author seamus heaney""

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their introductions, the selectors offer a passionate and accessible introduction to some of the greatest poets in history. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland. In 1798 he published the Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge, settling shortly after in Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with his sister Dorothy. He died at Rydal Mount in 1850, shortly before the posthumous publication of that landmark of English Romanticism, The Prelude.

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In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature.W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin, and was educated in Ireland and England. He was instrumental in the development of a national Irish theatre - and in particular, the founding of the Abbey Theatre. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

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When David Thomson took a journey to the sea coasts of Scotland and Ireland to seek out the legend of the selchies - mythological creatures who transform from seals into humans - a magical world emerged. Men were rescued by seals in stormy seas, took seal-women for their wives and had their children suckled by seal-mothers.Timeless and haunting, The People of the Sea retains its spellbinding charm and brings to life the enchanting stories of these mysterious creatures of Celtic folklore.

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This Norton Critical Edition includes: • Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s poetic translation of the great Anglo-Saxon epic—winner of the Whitbread Prize—along with his translator’s introduction. • Detailed explanatory annotations and an introduction to Old English language and prosody by Daniel Donoghue. • More than two dozen visuals, including, new to the Second Edition, a fine selection of objects from the Staffordshire Hoard. • A rich array of Anglo-Saxon and early northern civilisation materials, providing student readers with Beowulf’s cultural and historical context. • Nine critical interpretations, three of them new to the Second Edition. • A glossary of personal names and a selected bibliography.

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Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf (1999) was hailed as a masterpiece, alerting readers to his extraordinary ability to tune into other poets and languages and render their work fresh and alive in his own voice. In fact, as this volume attests, from the very beginning translation informed over fifty years of Heaney's critical and creative output, to which the posthumous publication of his translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI (2016) - also widely acclaimed - made a fitting epilogue.Heaney not only translated classic works of Latin and Old English but also a great number of poems from Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Russian, German, Scottish Gaelic, Czech, classical and modern Greek, modern and Middle French, medieval and modern Italian, and more. He was drawn in particular to the language of his homeland, a preoccupation that runs through this volume in those translations from Old, Middle and modern Irish. As he said: 'If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood, you lived in a primal Gaeltacht.'The breadth and depth in evidence here is extraordinary: from the stark landscapes of Sweeney's Ireland to Virgil and Dante's living underworlds, from monastic hymns and prayers to the civic and familial tragedies of Sophocles and Kochanowski.As editor, Marco Sonzogni frames the translations with the poet's own writings on his works, drawing from various introductions, interviews and commentaries. Collectively we are brought closer to an understanding of the remarkable extent of Heaney's talent, a genius for interpretation and transformation that distinguish him as one of the great poet-translators of all time.

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A companion to The Rattle Bag, The School Bag is an engaging and authoritative selection for the classroom.Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have chosen an eclectic range of poets read in today's schools, but also those poems that the editors themselves read at school, or those from which they learned the most. Balancing the canon with more personal selections, The School Bag is an exhilarating introduction for any student of poetry.

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Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and conceived of as a collection of their own favourite poems, The Rattle Bag has established itself as the classic anthology of our time. Heaney and Hughes have brought together an inspired and diverse selection, ranging from undisputed masterpieces to rare discoveries, as well as drawing upon works in translation and traditional poems from oral cultures. In effect, this anthology has transformed the way we define and appreciate poetry, and it will continue to do so for years to come. Including writers from Shakespeare and Blake to Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot, The Rattle Bag is eclectic, instructive and inspiring at the same time.

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Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf ?is the elegiac narrative of the Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in ?Beowulf ?and its immense emotional credibility Seamus Heaney gives the great epic convincing reality But how to visualize the poet's story has always been a challenge for modern-day readers. In Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, John D. Niles, a specialist in Old English literature, provides visual counterparts to Heaney's remarkable translation. More than one hundred full-page illustrations—Viking warships, chain mail, lyres, spearheads, even a reconstruction of the Great Hall—make visible Beowulf's world and the elemental themes of his story: death, divine power, horror, heroism, disgrace, devotion, and fame. This mysterious world is now transformed into one of material splendor as readers view its elegant goblets, dragon images, and finely crafted gold jewelry against the backdrop of the Danish landscape of its origins.

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In his latest book of essays Karl Miller turns his attention to appreciate certain writers of the English-speaking modern world. A new ruralism has come to notice in this country, and the book is drawn to country lives as they have figured in the literature of the last century. An introductory essay is centred on the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. Journeys taken with Seamus Heaney and Andrew O'Hagan to this countryside, and others, are threaded throughout the book. The poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes are discussed, together with the fiction of Ian McEwan, the Canadian writer Alistair Macleod, the Irish writer John McGahern and the Baltimorean Anne Tyler. Scotland is a preoccupation of the later pieces, including the letters of Henry Cockburn, a lifelong interest of the author, who is also interested here in foxes and their current metropolitan profile.

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