Seamus Heaney Salon with David Holdeman
What: Seamus Heaney Salon, facilitated by Dr. David Holdeman
When: Thursday, April 10, 7 pm
Where: Private Residence, RSVP wordspace@wordspace
Please Note: This is a public event but requires RSVP for address
Admission: Suggested Donation at event, Members Free
Celebrate National Poetry Month!
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.In the early 1960s, he became a lecturer in Belfast after attending university there, and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1972 until his death.
Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997 and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994 he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in 1996 was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Other awards that he received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). In 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry. His literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.
David Holdeman, professor of English at the University of North Texas, leads us through a reading of the poems of Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. His death last year at the age of 74 brought mourning and joyous memories of the great poet, teacher and critic. William Logan has called Heaney’s “the most flexible and beautiful voice of our age.” Andrew Motion in The Guardian says one of Heaney’s great strengths is that “his high-mindedness never escapes the limits of the familiar experience – but at the same time he leaves us in no doubt that his first loyalty is to what Yeats called ‘the spiritual intellect’s great work.’”
Dr. Holdeman’s insightful explication and reading of Yeats’ poems here two springs ago was buoyant and moving, and he is also a lover of Heaney’s life-enhancing poems of Seamus Heaney. Holdeman’s scholarly books include The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge, 2006) and W. B. Yeats in Context (Cambridge, 2010).
