The Frontier of Writing

A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose

Ian Hickey, Eugene O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781032597621
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040037829
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney's Prose is the first collection of essays solely focused on examining the Nobel prize winning poet's prose. The collection offers ten different perspectives on this body of work which vary from sustained thematic analyses on poetic form, the construction of identity, and poetry as redress, to a series of close readings of prose writing on poetic exemplars such as Robert Lowell, Patrick Kavanagh, W.B Yeats, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Brian Friel. Seamus Heaney's prose is extensive in its literary depth, knowledge, critical awareness and its span. During the course of his life, he published six collections of prose entitled Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings, The Place of Writing, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures and Finders Keepers. Each of these texts is addressed in the collection alongside occasional and specific essays such as 'Crediting Poetry', 'Writer and Righter' and 'Mossbawn via Mantua: Ireland in/and Europe, Cross-currents and Exchanges', among many others. This book is a comprehensive and timely study of Seamus Heaney's prose from leading international scholars in the field.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Coming to Poetic Terms with Himself and Others
• 1 ‘Things Founded Clean on Their Own Shapes’: Seamus Heaney and the Shape of Poetry
• 2 Seamus Heaney’s Uncanny Encounters
• 3 Double Agent: The Redress of Seamus Heaney’s Prose Poems
• 4 Preoccupied with Redress: Heaney Meditates on Getting his ‘Feel into Words’
• 5 ‘The Makings of a Music’: Musicality and Seamus Heaney’s Prose
• 6 The Limits of Redress: Heaney’s Aesthetics of Grace Confronts Larkin’s Struggle with Gravity
• 7 Different Animals: Heaney’s Public and Poetic Ted Hughes
• 8 ‘Moving in Step’: Seamus Heaney on Patrick Kavanagh
• 9 ‘The Push of the Whole Man’: Heaney on Robert Lowell
• 10 Seamus Heaney’s Wordsworthian Prose Assessments of Brian Friel’s Drama
• Index