Seamus Heaney: A conversation
Join the Master of Magdalene College, Dr Rowan Williams, for a virtual panel discussion on the topic of Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
Dr Williams is joined by Professor Eamon Duffy, Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity, and Mr Fintan O’Toole, acclaimed Irish journalist and 2020 Magdalene Parnell Fellow.
The discussion builds on the annual Parnell lecture by Mr O’Toole also available to watch below.
Seamus Heaney: A conversation
Parnell Lecture 2020
Escaped from the Massacre?: Heaney and History
Mr Fintan O'Toole (2019), gives this year's Parnell Lecture, Escaped from the Massacre?: Heaney and History.
Seamus Heaney is generally thought of as a poet of memory and rootedness. But he is also a poet of history, and his relationship to the historic past is much more dynamic and uncertain. He grew with, and was an active participant in, a system of communal and tribal memory that he could neither continue nor disown. Paradoxically his irresolvable dilemma became a source of creative energy. Faced with a range of options for dealing with history developed in Irish writing, he chose them all.