Seamus Heaney

April 13, 2010 - 8:56pm
Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, reads poetry and talks about his life as a writer and poet at Hendricks Chapel.

Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and writer Seamus Heaney gave a lecture at Syracuse University Tuesday evening, April 13, 2010. SU and Le Moyne College students sat impatiently and eager to hear what Heaney had to say.

“I love poetry. He’s the only poet I have come to see here,” said Samantha Kharasch, a freshman modern foreign language major at SU. “As a reader, I understand his works easily. It [his poetry] makes you listen.”  

April 13, 2010 - 6:59pm
The Northern Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner went to college and began writing 'to make sense of a life in that time.'

Tensions between past and present, rural and urban life, the individual and the community dominated the early life of poet Seamus Heaney who grew up in the ethnically torn Northern Ireland countryside.

Heaney, 71, came from a place where he and his family “still plowed with horses, lit the fire in the morning, carried water from wells.”

“In very quick time all that changed," Heaney said.

Rapid industrialization in the 1950s pushed his family to a more urban lifestyle.

Soon afterward, Heaney went to college and began writing “to make sense of a life in that time...