Seamus Heaney, Eleven Poems

Jason David Hall (University of Exeter)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.4: Irish Writing and Culture, 400-present.
Vol. editors: Paul Delaney (Trinity College Dublin), Anne Markey (Dublin City University), Ian Campbell Ross (Trinity College Dublin), Sinéad Sturgeon (Queen's University Belfast)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1965

Places

Ireland, Republic of (Eire) (Country of Origin)
Northern Ireland (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

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Seamus Heaney’s pamphlet

Eleven Poems

was published in November of 1965 by Festival Publications of Queen’s University, Belfast. Running to only sixteen pages and costing 3s. 0d., this slender offering collects some of Heaney’s earliest poems. As the acknowledgements state, some poems had already appeared in

The Dublin Magazine

Kilkenny Magazine

Listener

New Statesman

and

Poetry

; one poem (“Peter Street at Bankside”) had been “commissioned to be read at the foundation ceremony of the new Lyric Theatre, Belfast”. [1] All save this poem would appear the following year in Heaney’s début book

Death of a Naturalist

. The poems are “Personal Helicon”, “Mid-Term Break”, “Follower”, “The Diviner”, “Waterfall”, “Docker”, “For the Commander of ‘The…

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1331 words

Citation: Hall, Jason David. "Eleven Poems". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 October 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10118, accessed 26 April 2024.]

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