“Crediting Poetry.”

Seamus Heaney

“Crediting Poetry.”

Stockholm

1995

Photostat. Inscribed: “Seamus Heaney.” Courtesy copy of Heaney’s Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, distributed to attendees at the lecture, December 7, 1995

Heaney was the next Irish poet after Yeats to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Nobel lecture, he spoke of Yeats standing “on this platform more than seventy years ago, [when] Ireland was emerging from the throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the heels of a war of independence fought against the British. … it was over by May, 1923, some seven months before Yeats sailed to Stockholm, but it was bloody, savage and intimate, and for generations to come it would dictate the terms of politics within…the Republic of Ireland.” Heaney observed that “Yeats barely alluded to the civil war or the war of independence in his Nobel speech. Rather, “he came to Sweden to tell the world that the local work of poets and dramatists had been as important to the transformation of his native place and times as the ambushes of guerilla armies.” And this has been the story of this exhibition.