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 ...

Join John for this fascinating exploration of how and why Seamus Heaney used visual art - paintings, sculptures and photographs - in poems and texts to frame what he felt and thought about the world.

The families were so close that on the occasion of Caitlin and her sister’s baptisms into the Catholic Church in 1971, Heaney wrote the girls a poem. Caitlin writes, “When Seamus stood up and ...

Meán Scoil Mhuire, Longford students Kanyinsola Richard Akinyemi and Weronika Kostyra have been recognised as finalists in ...

I had a column titled Poems by Heart. The column drew responses from many readers, which I will publish in due course. (Thank ...

The poem I really should commit to memory is Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript” (“the earthed lightning of a flock of swans”; ”You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known ...

Today we launch The Telegraph’s fifth annual poetry competition ... or follow a family-member through time, as Seamus Heaney does in Digging, skipping through the decades in a single line ...

The BBC on Wednesday celebrates 100 years of a weather forecast for sailors in British waters that has inspired musicians and ...

For our December event we have arranged a screening of the 1970 film Ulster in Focus: A Christmas Garland. We will also be looking at some of the Christmas cards made and sent by Heaney.

In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ ...