The Literary Legacy of Seamus Heaney (2014)

The O.B. Hardison Poetry Series event The Literary Legacy of Seamus Heaney was held in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre on April 7, 2014. Seamus Heaney was called “the most important Irish poet since W.B. Yeats” by Robert Lowell. Heaney was an honorary member of The Folger Poetry Board and the inaugural poet for the Folger Poetry Board Reading in 1991. The Folger Shakespeare Library honored his 2013 passing with a reading celebrating the acclaimed poet, translator, playwright, and lecturer. Poets for the evening included Eamon Grennan, Paula Meehan, Frank Bidart, Bernard O'Donoghue and Jane Hirshfield. Mary Kinzie's The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose which reflects upon the role of poets, is available online at the Folger Gift Shop.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was a Northern Ireland native and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the author of over 30 books of poetry, prose, and translations, including District and Circle, Field Work. Human Chain, and Beowulf. He had received numerous awards and honors including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, and two Whitbread Prizes. In 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry. Heaney was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and lived in Dublin.

Eamon Grennan

Eamon Grennan's collections include Matter of Fact, The Quick of It, Still Life with Waterfall, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Selected & New Poems, So It Goes, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and What Light There Is and Other Poems, a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His Leopardi: Selected Poems won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and he has published a collection of critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century. Grennan's grants and prizes in the United States include awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Grennan taught at Vassar College for thirty years where he was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English and now divides his time between the US and the west of Ireland.

Grennan also read for the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series on May 18, 2009, March 1, 2004, and November 25, 1991.

Paula Meehan

Paula Meehan is an award-winning poet, playwright, and professor. Her books of poetry include Painting Rain, Return and No Blame, Pillow Talk, and Dharmakaya, among others. She has written plays for children and adults and has conducted writing workshops with inner city communities and in prisons as well as universities. Her work is much translated, widely anthologized, and among the prizes she has won include The Martin Toonder Award, the Butler Literary Award and the Denis Devlin Award. More recently she has turned to writing plays. She is a member of Aosdána, an Irish association of artists, and lives in Dublin. In 2013, Meehan was named Ireland Professor of Poetry by President Michael D. Higgins.

Meehan read for the O. B. Hardison previously, on September 19, 2011.

Frank Bidart

Frank Bidart's most recent book Metaphysical Dog is a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other collections of poetry include Watching the Spring Festival, Star Dust, Desire, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90. He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award and, most recently, the 2007 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He teaches at Wellesley College.

Bernard O'Donoghue

Bernard O'Donoghue is a poet, literary critic and author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry. His poetry collections are Poaching Rights, The Weakness, Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award, Here Nor There, and Outliving. His work of verse translation, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was published in 2006 and a Selected Poems in 2008. Bernard O'Donoghue received a Cholmondeley Award in 2009. His most recent poetry collection is Farmers Cross, which was shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Jane Hirschfield

Jane Hirshfield, poet, essayist, translator, is the author of seven collections of poetry, the most recent is Come, Thief. Her other collections include After, which was shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize and named a “best book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Financial Times, Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated four books containing the work of poets from the past.

Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and (both twice) the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Award and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award. In 2012 she received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry.

In the fall of 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets and in 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy.