Poets

Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was a famous American poet, who had lived from 1830 to 1886. She was born in a place called Amherst, in Massachusetts. In 1840 she went to the academy in her town and studied English and classical literature. At 17 she began attending a female seminary in South Hadley. After one year she had been taken home from the school by her brother, and never showed up there again. Possible because she refused to give up her life for Jesus Christ and didn’t want to attend there any more. She lived almost completely isolated. At this point, she would only leave the house anymore to visit some of her relatives in the country. During this time she had written a lot of poems. She has written up to 2000 of them, but only a number of them was eventually published. Emily Dickinson died later in 1886 because of Bright’s disease, a kidney disease. Her family later found handwritten books containing all of the poems she had written at that time.

The poems Emily had written were always recognisable by the large amounts of dashes and capitalisations of words. After her death only 10 of her poems had been published. Later a volume of Dickinson’s poems had been released showing more of her work. Her niece had published some of her songs later as well, collected in The Single Hound emerged in 1914, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1924, Further Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1929. At first the critics had been positive and she was popular, but after two years the critics had become negative. Some serious readers who had studied her work claimed that the graphical aspect of her writings were also important for understanding the poem. The length and angles of the dashes could have a possible meaning.


Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney is an Irish poet, born in 1939 and still alive today. He has won the Nobel price for literature and currently lives in Dublin. He was the first born in a town near Belfast in Northern Island. They later moved to Bellaghy. There he went to a college and later to a Catholic school. In 1957 Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Literature. He graduated in 1961 and when he was attending another school he came in touch with the poet works of Patrick Kavanagh. He began publishing poetry and became a lecturer. Later he became part of a group of young poets and would be introduced to other poets.

The first book of Heaney called “Eleven Poems” was published in 1965. Later in 1966 he became a lecturer at the University of Belfast. He had also been a guest lecturer at the University of California in the United States of America. He began giving readings throughout Ireland and Britain and the United States. In 1976 he became the Head of English at a college in Dublin, where he and his family moved to. Other universities he had been giving teachings to were Harvard University, Fordham University and the University of Oxford.
Heaney uses a lot of of his own personal life as inspiration for his poems. The places where he lives play a good role in this. Ireland is a very good example for a place of inspiration to him. His own family plays a part too, in a manner that some of the family members are used as characters in his poems.

Anglo-Saxon, a very old form of the English language is a big influence in his work. He had studied the language at the university. His poems had led to increase the popularity of this language once again.

Heaney was also known for writing essays and for having written two plays. His work is being used in school in the UK. He has had a big influence on the word, being named the most important poet.