Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but ⁠Stepping Stones⁠ (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in ⁠100 Poems⁠, and in the ⁠individual collections⁠.

There are many ways to look at Heaney’s work, and the ten poems I choose only present one picture: a poet as at home on the farm as he was at Harvard; as interested in literary history as in archaeology and the deep interior of the Irish imagination; as concerned with childhood, memory, and family as with the darkest aspects of human life. In introducing these poems, I reflect on Heaney’s importance in my own life, and the huge impact his death had on me, ten years ago this month.

The poems I read are:  

• Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist, 1966)
• The Forge and Bogland (Door into the Dark, 1969)
• The Tollund Man (Wintering Out, 1972)
• The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work, 1979)
• Squarings #2, #8, #40 (Seeing Things, 1991)
• from his translations of Beowulf (1999)
• Uncoupled (Human Chain, 2010)  

The episode ends with Heaney himself reading “The Tollund Man.”

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