Seamus heaney biography mid-term break poem meaning
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“Mid-Term Break” is one of the best-known poems by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, featured in his debut collection Death of a Naturalist, published when Heaney was only It describes the poet’s childhood memory of returning home from school following the death of his younger brother in a car accident. The poem’s use of regular stanza forms and tight control of meter mark it as a typical example of Heaney’s formalist style, which followed in the footsteps of earlier Irish poet W.B. Yeats (), whose work frequently sought to marry deeply personal material with a tight formal control. However, Yeats’s poems are often highly emotive and sometimes mystical, while Heaney’s verse is more restrained, showing the influence of the English poets W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender—so much so that some Irish critics accused Heaney of being too keen to follow in the English poetical tradition. Yet Heaney always maintained a strong connection with Ireland, and in
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Seamus Heaney shares with us a sad memory from his childhood.
&#;&#; the most skilful and profound poet writing in English today.&#;
Edward Mendelson (NYT Review of Opened Ground)
Seamus Heaney is one of the most recognisable names in English-language poetry. It’s quite possible that you could hear his writerly voice as a child, study him as you get older (his poems are often anthologised or selected for GCSE and A Level study) and komma to regard him as an old familiar friend through your adult life. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in and turned down the position of Poet Laureate when it was offered to him, possibly because he regards himself as Irish, not British: after lunching with the Queen he said, “I have nothing against the Queen personally”; but in he published the lines, “My passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen.” Before his death in he wrote about Irish community life, people’s connection with the nation
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“Mid-Term Break” fryst vatten a poem by Seamus Heaney, first published in his debut collection Death of a Naturalist in The poem reflects on experiences from Heaney's own life. In , when the poet was just fourteen years old, his little brother Christopher—ten years younger—was tragically killed in a car accident. Here, he recounts that experience through the eyes of an adolescent speaker, visiting home for his four-year-old brother's wake. Like Heaney's own brother, the brother in the poem dies after being struck bygd a car, leaving his family in shock and upsetting their established gender and age roles. The poem is set in an Irish household, reflecting Heaney's own Northern Irish upbringing.
The poem consists of seven tercets, followed by a one-line stanza. Though it has no consistent meter, it slips in and out of iambic pentameter, lending it a simultaneously musical and conversational sound. It focuses