Seamus Heaney’s Gifts, by Henry Hart, Distinguished PSV Member, Explores Heaney’s Preoccupation with Gifts and Gift-Exchange

From LSU Press Release: Throughout his career, Seamus Heaney maintained that poetry came to him from a mysterious source like a gift of grace, and that the recipient of this sort of offering had an ethical obligation to share it with others. Seamus Heaney’s Gifts provides the first comprehensive examination of his preoccupation with gifts and gift-exchange. Drawing on extensive research in Heaney’s papers, as well as three decades of correspondence with the poet, Henry Hart presents a richly detailed inspection of Heaney’s life and work that foregrounds the Irishman’s commitment to the vocation of poetry as a public art capable of reestablishing civil bonds between people in polarized societies. As Hart shows, Heaney found models for gift-giving in his rural community in Northern Ireland, the Bible, the rituals of the Catholic Church, and the literature of mystical and mythical quests.
Seamus Heaney’s Gifts explains the famed poet’s ideas about the artist’s gift, the necessity of gift- exchange acts, and the moral responsibility to share one’s talents for the benefit of others.