Book description
The title, The Government of the Tongue, carries suggestions of
both monastic discipline and untrammelled romanticism, and is meant to
raise an old question about the rights and status of poetic utterance
itself. Should it be governed? Should it be the governor? Seamus
Heaney here scrutinizes the work of several poets, British and Irish,
American and European, whose work is responsive to such strains and tensions.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of
a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and since
then he has published poetry, criticism and translations - including
Beowulf (1999) - which have established him as one of the leading poets
now at work. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
District and Circle (2006) was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006.
Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll,
appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for
Literature.
