Door into the Dark, Seamus Heaney's second collection of poems, first appeared in 1969. Already his widely celebrated gifts of precision, thoughtfulness, and musicality were everywhere apparent.

A Study Guide for Seamus Heaney's "The Forge," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Death of a Naturalist (1966) marked the auspicious debut of Seamus Heaney, a universally acclaimed master of modern literature. As a first book of poems, it is remarkable for its accurate perceptions and rich linguistic gifts.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Seamus Heaney: From Pastoral to Politics and Beyond is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

"Poetry born of historical upheaval bears witness both to actual historical events and considerations of poetics. Under the duress of history the poet, who is torn between lamentation and celebration, seeks to achieve distance from his troubled times. Add to this a deep love for and commitment to the Irish and English poetic traditions, and a strong desire to search for models outside his culture, and you have the poetry of the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-). In this study, Carmen Bugan looks at how the poetry of Seamus Heaney, born of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has encountered the'historically-tested imaginations' of Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, as he aimed to fulfil a Horatian poetics, a poetry meant to both instruct and delight its readers. Carmen Bugan is the author of a collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians, and a memoir, Burying the Typewriter."

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II – railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence" of "Cattle out in rain" – are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present – a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety. But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems which "do the rounds of the district" – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals. District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Throughout his career in poetry, Seamus Heaney maintained roles in education and was a visible presence in the print and broadcast media. Seamus Heaney and Society presents a dynamic new engagement with one of the most celebrated poets of the modern period, examining the ways in which his work as a poet was shaped by his work as a teacher, lecturer, critic, and public figure. Drawing on a range of archival material, this book revives the varied contexts within which Heaney's work was written, published, and circulated. Mindful of the different spheres which surrounded his pursuit of poetry, it assesses his achievements and status in Ireland, Britain, and the United States through close analysis of his work in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, and manuscript drafts of key writings now held in the National Library of Ireland. Asserting the significance of the cultural, institutional, and historical worlds in which Heaney wrote and was read, Seamus Heaney and Society offers a timely reconstruction of the social lives of his work, while also exploring the ways in which he questioned and sustained the privacy and singularity of poetry. Ultimately, it considers how the enduring legacy of a great poet emerges from the working life of a contemporary writer.

The first detailed introduction to the entirety of Seamus Heaneys workThis study will enable readers to gain clearer understanding of the life and major works of Seamus Heaney. It considers literary influences on Heaney, ranging from English poets such as Wordsworth, Hughes, and Auden to Irish poets such as Kavanagh and Yeats to world poets such as Virgil and Dante. It shows how Heaney was closely attuned to poetry's impact on daily life and current events even as he articulated a convincing apologia for poetry's own life and integrity. Discussing Heaney's deep immersion in Irish Catholicism, this book demonstrates how faith influenced his belief system, poetry and politics. Finally, it also considers how deeply Heaney's artistic endeavours were intertwined with politics in Northern Ireland, especially through his embrace of constitutional nationalism but rejection of physical force republicanism.Key FeaturesIncludes sections on biography, historical, cultural and political contexts, poetry and other genres, as well as a concluding section on primary works and secondary criticismPays special attention to the marriage of form and content in the poetry and how they work together to express subtle shades of meaningOffers close readings of Heaney's canonical poems throughout his career, including the early seminal poems such as Digging, the abog poems, and his many elegies, such as Casualty, Station Island, and ClearancesDraws on drafts of the poems and prose at the Heaney archives at Emory University and the National Library of Ireland

A sampling of some of the most famous Irish legends.