World-renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, will give a reading of his poetry on Wednesday, Oct. 25, as part of the University's Tercentennial celebration.

The reading, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 8 p.m. in Battell Chapel, corner of Elm and College streets. The event is sponsored by the Tercentennial Office, the Schlesinger Fund and Jonathan Edwards College.

Once dubbed by poet Robert Lowell as "the most important poet since Yeats," Heaney is also a critic, translator and playwright. When awarded the Nobel Prize, he was praised for creating "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He was awarded an honorary degree from Yale at the University's 1999 Commencement, where he was hailed for drawing on his personal experience and Irish history, legends and lore, while at the same time exploring in his work universal experience -- "the landscape of the human heart."

Heaney's poetry is studied at schools and universities across the globe, and has been explored in English classes this semester by many students at Yale, both as a matter of course and in anticipation of the poet's campus visit. Some 300 Yale freshmen, for example, have focused on Heaney's work in their English 115 course "Introduction to Literary Study," and look forward to hearing the poet himself read some of the works they have studied, according to English professor Vera Kutzinski, who teaches and directs the course.

Much of Heaney's poetry is grounded in the rural County Derry in Northern Ireland, where he was born. His first collection of poetry, "Death of a Naturalist," was published in 1966 and earned him numerous prestigious awards. His other collections include "Door into the Dark," "North," "Wintering Out," "Selected Poems 1965-1975," "Station Island," "The Haw Lantern," "Seeing Things," "Open Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996" and "The Spirit Level."

Heaney has expressed his own thoughts on his poetry and other matters in several collections of prose and essays, including "Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978," "The Government of the Tongue," "The Place of Writing" and "The Redress of Poetry," the latter based on lectures he gave at Oxford University, where he was professor of poetry from 1989 to 1994.

He also described the value of poetry in his Nobel Lecture, in which he commented that poems "touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed." He added: "The form of the poem ... is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being."

In 1990, Heaney published "The Cure at Troy," a translation of Sophocles' "Phil-octetes." The play has been staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre, among other venues. His most recent undertaking, "Beowulf: A New Verse Translation," published in 1999, garnered critical acclaim and England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for the best book of the year published by an English or Irish writer. Heaney has also edited several poetry anthologies.

Heaney graduated from and was a lecturer in English at Queen's College in Belfast, where he lived for some time. Although he now resides in Dublin, he has made the conflict in Northern Ireland an important subject in his work. Heaney has also taught at Carysfort College in Dublin and has divided his time between that city and the United States since 1984, when he began teaching at Harvard University. He is currently the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence there.

Throughout his career, Heaney has been involved in artistic and educational causes. He served on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland and has been a judge or speaker at many poetry competitions, literary conferences and other events. He is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and is a foreign member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Celebrated throughout the world for his literary contributions, Heaney was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

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