Heaney: A Style Guide — with Don Paterson

This two-hour webinar offers an in-depth look at the notoriously inimitable style of Seamus Heaney, arguably the greatest English-language poet of the last fifty years. Though a Heaney poem will often read as a seamless whole, it is shaped by a set of favoured strategies, techniques and stylistic habits that operate in concert. Many of these are not unique to Heaney; others are far more idiosyncratic, and allow us a valuable window into his thinking and creative process. By identifying his characteristic approaches to closure, metaphor, syntax, POV, sound, lineation, and symbol, we can also begin to adapt aspects of his practice in our own writing.

The class will also show us how Heaney conceived of ‘the poem’, and how his technique served his deeper imaginative and intellectual aims. He once wisely remarked that 'the gift of writing is to be self-forgetful'. A study of Heaney's style reveals his…