Portrait of the Artist: Seamus Heaney and Pictures
Portrait of the Artist: Seamus Heaney and Pictures – a talk for the general public on Friday, November 27
Seamus Heaney was deeply interested in what it meant to see. In his poetry, he concentrated intently on objects, images, and on the idea of vision, in order to ask questions about how we perceive our environment, and how we describe and remember our own experiences. This talk will focus on four poems in which Heaney writes about paintings and photographs, and explore the ideas he raised in them about what it means to use words and images to represent the world around us.
Portrait of the Artist: Seamus Heaney in Pictures – live interactive sessions, of particular interest to Leaving Cert students (Friday November 20, Monday November 23)
In this session, we will look closely at four poems by Seamus Heaney, in which Heaney describes the process of looking. In each of the poems, Heaney is writing directly about a painting or a photograph, so we’ll consider these images alongside the poems, and discuss how Heaney ‘sees’ through language. We will also discuss the way Heaney finds, in some painters, and example for his own craft as a poet. While this session may be of particular interest to pupils studying Seamus Heaney’s work for the Leaving Certificate, it is open to all, and no prior knowledge of Heaney’s poetry is required.