Government of the Tongue

The title, The Government of the Tongue, carries suggestions of both monastic discipline and untrammelled romanticism, and is meant to raise an old question about the rights and status of poetic utterance itself. Should it be governed? Should it be the governor?

Seamus Heaney here scrutinizes the work of several poets, British and Irish, American and European, whose work is responsive to such strains and tensions.



Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland.

Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations - including

Beowulf (1999) - which have established him as one of the leading poets now at work. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

District and Circle (2006) was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006.

Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for Literature.