Seamus Heaney (1939)

Life and Works

Family background am education Seamus Heaney was born into a Catholic farming family in Northern Ireland, Hi grew up in the countryside of County Derry, which is the setting of much of his poetry. A brilliant student, he won several scholarships and graduated with a degree in English langi and literature in 1961. He then embarked on a teaching careej and began to write.

Death of a Naturalist In the mid-1960s he published! collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist, which brought hi immediate critical acclaim. A second volume, Door into the Darij was published in 1969.

The poetry of everyday rural life In these early works Heaney portrays rural life with limpid simplicity in sensuous, lyrical language. He celebrates common people, the rhythms of seasonal life and daily routines, and equates the art of writing poetry to traditional skills such as thatching and digging. Through his vibrant images he creates what he calk 'the music of what happens. An awareness of mortality is however present in many of his pastoral lyrics.

The 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland When violence in Northern Ireland escalated in the early ‘70s, Heaney moved his family to the Republic of Ireland and since 1976 he has lived in Dublin. In his poetry of the 1970s and 1980s (North, 1975, Field Work, 1979, The Haw Lantern, 1987), Heaney passionately analyses Ireland's bloody past and troubled present. However, he never takes a position in the conflict: his essential message is one of peace, and his work shows compassion for all t victims of the senseless civil war. In 'Casualty', for example, a poem about a Catholic friend murdered by a bomb set by the Catholic paramilitary group the IRA, he exposes the muddling о right and wrong that engulfs the Irish conflict.

Style Extremely evocative yet direct and accessible, Heaney's carefully crafted poetry is celebrated for its powerful imagery, musical phrasing and rhythms, which he creates with the subtle alternatioin of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words.

Other works He has also published several volumes of critical essays (in which he concludes t the role of the poet is to ensure the survival of beauty), and has published a much-acclaimed translation of Beowulf (2000).

Teaching positions and the Nobel Prize For the past thirty years Heaney has held teaching positions in such prestigious universities as Berkeley, Harvard and Oxford. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, 'for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.' He is one of the most widely read poets in the English language today.

Sylvia Plath

(1932-1963)

Life and Works

Background Sylvia Plath was born in Massachusetts, USA. She was an excellent student and won many awards and prizes. During her High School years she had several of her poems and stories published in literary magazines. Plath's early poetry revealed an emotionally fragile personality.

Fragile personality She was obsessed by the idea of perfection and put herself under enormous pressure which eventually led to a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt.

Cambridge, Ted Hughes and marriage Following hospitalisation and psychotherapy, she recovered, graduated High School! 'summa cum laude' and won a scholarship to study at] Cambridge, England where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. The couple moved to the USA but, after just three years, returned to England where their daughter was born.

The Colossus In 1960 Sylvia Plath's first volume of poetry, The Colossus, was published and she began work on an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. In 1962 she had a second child, The Colossus was published in the USA, her radio play, Three Women, was set to air on the BBC and she was at last j gaining some recognition.

Suicide This period of relative happiness was interrupted when she discovered that her husband was having an affair. The couple divorced and six months later Sylvia Plath committed suicide at her home in London.

Themes Sylvia Plath had not been well-known before her death, but the posthumous publication of The Bell Jar (1963) and Ariel (1965, the collection of thirty-five poems she had written in the last months of her life), brought her to the public's attention. While her early poems are mostly about death, her later work shows the complex personality of a woman in search of her own identity. Her concern for the condition of women, which emerges in both her poetry and her autobiography, made her into a spokesperson for feminism. She was also deeply concerned with issues such as consumerism, the misuse of the mass-media and technology and the exploitation of man and the environment.

Style Sylvia Plath's poetry is highly personal and has often been defined as 'confessional'. Many of her poems are written in the dramatic monologue form. Surprising uses of sound and rhythm, literary equivalents of cinematic techniques such as flashbacks and close-ups, shocking metaphors and highly personal symbols make her poetic style extremely distinctive. In 1981 she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.