Seamus Heaney and Gillian Clarke
and the Pre 1914 Cluster
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image taken from: nobelprize.org |
image taken from: www.poetrysociety.org.uk |
Poems to be studied back to top
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| Seamus Heaney | Gillain Clarke | Pre 1914 Poems | |||
| Poem | Page No. |
Poem | Page No. |
Poem | Page No. |
| Storm on the Island | 19 |
Catrin | 27 |
On my First Sonne | 46 |
| Death of a Naturalist | 21 |
A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998 | 29 |
The Affliction of Margaret | 47 |
| Digging | 22 |
The Field-Mouse | 30 |
Patrolling Barnegat | 49 |
| At a Potato Digging | 25 |
Cold Knap Lake | 31 |
Sonnet | 58 |
Poets' Background back
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Seamus Heaney back taken from: www.poetryconnection.net
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Seamus Heaney (b. April 13, 1939) is a poet, writer and lecturer from Northern Ireland . He is one of the most widely known and important poets working in English, or perhaps any language, today. Heaney was born, the eldest of nine children, on a farm called Mossbawn, in County Derry thirty miles to the Northwest of Belfast, in Northern Ireland . He was brought up a Catholic. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practising for the D-Day landings. The family left the farm in 1953. He was educated at the local primary school and St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry to which he was awarded a scholarship. At St Columbs he was taught the Irish language. He then attended Queen's University, Belfast . In the sixties Heaney trained as a teacher and worked in schools in Belfast and Ballymurphy. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. His first book, Death of a Naturalist , was published in 1966. It met with much critical acclaim. In 1965 he met and married Marie Devlin. (Devlin is a writer herself and in 1994 published Over Nine Waves a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) They had three children. Throughout the sixties, he was working, at formal meetings, with a number of writers including Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Philip Hobsbaum. In the seventies younger poets attended these meetings, now run by Heaney, including Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby. In 1968, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called 'Room to Rhyme', this lead to quite a lot of exposure for the poet's work. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. He became an elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1972 Heaney left his lectureship at Belfast and moved to the Republic, working at a teacher training college in Dublin . In 1984, Heaney was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, at Harvard University . In 1989, he was elected to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University , which he held for a five-year term to 1994 (not requiring residence in Oxford ). Throughout this time he was publishing prolifically and dividing his time between Ireland and America . He also continued to give public readings, which were very popular. So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed 'Heaneyboppers' suggesting an almost pop-music fanaticism on the part of his supporters. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
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Gillian Clarke back taken from: www.contemporarywriters.com
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Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff , Wales , and now lives with her family on a smallholding in Ceredigion. She has written books for children, including The Animal Wall: and other poems (1999), Owain Glyn Dwr 1400-2000 (2000) and One Moonlit Night (1991), the latter being translations from the Welsh of traditional stories by T. Llew Jones. She has also written for stage, television and radio, several radio plays and poems being broadcast by the BBC. Gillian Clarke has published several collections of poetry including Letter From a Far Country (1982); Letting in the Rumour (1989); The King of Britain's Daughter (1993); and Five Fields (1998). The latest three collections have all been Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She is President of Ty Newydd, the Writer's Centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990, and teaches on the M.Phil Writing Course at the University of Glamorgan . She has travelled widely giving poetry readings and lectures, and her work has been translated into ten languages. Gillian Clarke's most recent poetry collection is Making the Beds for The Dead (2004). |
| Sample Essay and Poem back |
| Click here for an example of an A grade essay with hints and tips included. You can use these when writing your own essays. |
| Click here for an example of an annotated poem, it will give you a few hints at what to look out for. |
Essay Questions back
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June 2005 (1) Answer both parts (a) and (b)
(2) Compare how the poets have used structure to contribute to the meanings of At a Potato Digging by Seamus Heaney, one poem by Gillian Clarke and two poems from the Pre-1914 Poetry Bank.
(3) Answer both parts (a) and (b)
June 2006 (4) Answer both parts (a) and (b)
(5) Compare how strong feelings are presented in four of the poems you have studied from this selection. To do this, compare 'Catrin' by Gillian Clarke and three other poems, including one by Seamus Heaney and two from the Pre-1914 Poetry Bank.
(6) Compare the ways the poets present family relationships in two poems from List A and two poems from List B.
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