Henry Hart - Böcker

The Life of Robert Frost presents a unique and rich approach to the poet that includes original genealogical research concerning Frost's ancestors, and a demonstration of how mental illness plagued the Frost family and heavily influenced Frost's poetry. A widely revealing biography of Frost that discusses his often perplexing journey from humble roots to poetic fame, revealing new details of Frost's lifeTakes a unique approach by giving attention to Frost's genealogy and the family history of mental illness, presenting a complete picture of Frost's complexityDiscusses the traumatic effect on Frost of his father's early death and the impact on his poetry and outlookPresents original information on the influence of his mother's Swedenborgian mysticism

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.

Seamus Heaney, widely considered the most gifted living poet in Ireland and Britain, is the first Irish poet since Yeats to gain an international reputation. In this remarkable study, henry Hart discusses Heaney's poems, his creative and personal situations, and his assimilation of contemporary literary theory. From Heaney's Ulster background to poetic influences as diverse as Dante and Wordsworth, Yeats and Bly, Hart offers sophisticated, lucid insights.Hart argues that the best way into Heaney's poetic world is in seeking to understand him—as with Blake and Yeats—in terms of oppositions and conflicts, progressions and syntheses. At the root of all his work is a multifaceted argument with himself, with others, with sectarian Northern Ireland, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, with his Roman Catholicism, and with his Nationalist upbringing on a farm in County Derry.For each volume of poems, from Door into the Dark to The Haw Lantern, Hart identifies and works with a specific problem in the text, while developing its intellectual and creative implications. He covers aspects as diverse as Heaney's incorporation of antipastoral attitudes in his poems, his fascination with how etymology recapitulates ancient and modern history, and apocalypticism in North. Placing his trust in art's ability to confront conflicts between freedom and responsibility, between private craft and public involvement, Heaney is shown nonetheless to chastise himself for failing to have a greater impact on the situation he left behind in Northern Ireland.In pursuing the literary, religious, and political themes in his books of poetry, Hart shows that Heaney is no provincial bard, as some critics have suggested, but is as intellectually informed and astute as any postmodernist writer. Any reader of Seamus Heaney's poetry, and any poet, poetry scholar, critic of contemporary poetry, or student of Irish literature will gain much from reading this book.