Seamus Heaney's Gifts - by Henry Hart (Hardcover)

About the Book

""The fact of the matter," Seamus Heaney said in a 1997 interview with the Paris Review, "is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry." Throughout his career, Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, maintained that poetry came to him from a mysterious source like a gift of grace. He also believed that the recipient of this sort of boon had an ethical obligation to share it with others. Seamus Heaney's Gifts, by the noted scholar and poet Henry Hart, offers the first comprehensive examination of Heaney's preoccupation with gifts and gift-exchange. Drawing on extensive research in Heaney's papers, as well as three decades of correspondence with the poet, Hart presents a richly detailed study of Heaney's life and work that foregrounds the Irishman's commitment to the vocation of poetry as a public art to be shared with audiences and readers around the world. Heaney traced his devotion to gifts back to the actual present of a Conway Stewart fountain pen that his parents gave him at the age of twelve when he left his family farm in Northern Ireland to attend a private Catholic secondary school in Londonderry. He commemorated this gift in "Digging," the first poem in his first book, and in two poems he wrote near the end of his life: "The Conway Stewart" and "On the Gift of a Fountain Pen." Friends and doctors had warned him that his endless globetrotting to give lectures and poetry readings had damaged his health. Yet he felt obligated to share his talent with audiences around the world until his death in 2013. As Hart shows, Heaney found his first models for gift-giving in his rural community in Northern Ireland, the Bible, the rituals of the Catholic Church, and the literature of mystical and mythical quests. Blending careful research with evocative commentaries on the poet's work, Seamus Heaney's Gifts explains his ideas about the artist's gift, the necessity of gift-exchange acts, and the moral responsibility to share one's talents for the benefit of others"--

Book Synopsis

"The fact of the matter," Seamus Heaney said in a 1997 interview with the Paris Review, "is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry." Throughout his career, Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, maintained that poetry came to him from a mysterious source like a gift of grace. He also believed that the recipient of this sort of boon had an ethical obligation to share it with others.

Seamus Heaney's Gifts, by the noted scholar and poet Henry Hart, offers the first comprehensive examination of Heaney's preoccupation with gifts and gift-exchange. Drawing on extensive research in Heaney's papers, as well as three decades of correspondence with the poet, Hart presents a richly detailed study of Heaney's life and work that foregrounds the Irishman's commitment to the vocation of poetry as a public art to be shared with audiences and readers around the world.

Heaney traced his devotion to gifts back to the actual present of a Conway Stewart fountain pen that his parents gave him at the age of twelve when he left his family farm in Northern Ireland to attend a private Catholic secondary school in Londonderry. He commemorated this gift in "Digging," the first poem in his first book, and in two poems he wrote near the end of his life: "The Conway Stewart" and "On the Gift of a Fountain Pen." Friends and doctors had warned him that his endless globetrotting to give lectures and poetry readings had damaged his health. Yet he felt obligated to share his talent with audiences around the world until his death in 2013. As Hart shows, Heaney found his first models for gift-giving in his rural community in Northern Ireland, the Bible, the rituals of the Catholic Church, and the literature of mystical and mythical quests.

Blending careful research with evocative commentaries on the poet's work, Seamus Heaney's Gifts explains his ideas about the artist's gift, the necessity of gift-exchange acts, and the moral responsibility to share one's talents for the benefit of others.

Review Quotes

"Henry Hart's book should be unignorable for future writers on Seamus Heaney and will be of genuine help to all who try to take an overview of his work."--Robert Crawford, author of Eliot after "The Wasteland"

"This is a fascinating, deftly and deeply researched study of Heaney, taking as its remit his lifelong sense of himself as a poet with a gift (he was!) and his penchant for gift-giving. It will quickly become required reading for the legions of Heaney's readers around the world."--Richard Rankin Russell, author of Seamus Heaney's Regions

"This is an original treatment of an important subject, written by a scholar and poet well-grounded in Heaney's work. There is much here that is new and fresh, and cumulatively the narrative gives a perceptive and highly textured account of one of our most celebrated poets."--Stephen Enniss, director of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

About the Author

Henry Hart is the Mildred and J. B. Hickman Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary. He has published four poetry collections and numerous scholarly books about modern poets, including biographies of James Dickey and Robert Frost. From 1984 to 1994 he coedited VERSE, an international poetry magazine, and from 2018 to 2020 he served as poet laureate of Virginia