Compare and Contrast the works The Early Purges and Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney

2681 Words11 Pages
Compare and Contrast the works ‘The Early Purges’ and ‘Mid-Term Break’ by Seamus Heaney On 13th April 1939, Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the poet who is often referred to as ‘Famous Seamus’, is probably the most widely admired of a group of talented Ulster Poets (Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Michael Langley, Paul Muldoon amongst them) . Heaney was brought up as a country boy on his father's cattle farm. He was the eldest in a Catholic family of nine children. He attended St. Columb's College, Derry, and moved in 1957 to Belfast to continue his studies. In 1961 Heaney graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, with a first class honours in English, and then he trained as teacher at St. Joseph's College of Education. After one year as a secondary school teacher, Heaney returned to St. Josephs, where he then became a lecturer at Queen University in 1966. The headmaster was the writer Michael MacLaverty from County Monaghan, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, also from Monaghan. His education therefore instituted something of a "Northern School" within Irish writing. Although Heaney is stylistically and temperamentally different from such writers as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (his contemporaries), and Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson (members of a younger Northern Irish generation), he does share with all of them the fate of having been born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust. This had the effect not only of darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a

More about Compare and Contrast the works The Early Purges and Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney

Open Document