It’s ordinarily only the famous who first approach a nonfiction book by thumbing through the index, looking for their own name. Unfamous, I nevertheless found myself doing just that this past summer ...

Seamus Heaney was a visionary bulwark against small-mindedness. When the Irish poet died suddenly in 2013, at age 74, a benign literary presence was robbed from us. The posthumous publication of his ...

Even the previously uncollected work in “The Poems of Seamus Heaney” shows a master craftsman in full control of his powers. Seamus Heaney’s ambition as an artist was balanced by a cool sense of ...

This article is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media. There will soon be a huge volume of collected Poems of Seamus Heaney (1,100 ...

When people asked the poet Seamus Heaney what it was like to be living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the start of the Troubles, he tended to downplay the violence: “Things aren’t too bad in our ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...

Fran Brearton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

On the 40th anniversary of Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s Nobel prize, Cambridge University Press has published Seamus Heaney and Catholicism, an in-depth study by Irish writer Gary Wade examining the ...

When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, who lived across the street, was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, ...