Professor Heaney
Professor Heaney – a two part radio documentary series on RTÉ Radio 1, which explores Seamus Heaney’s life as a teacher at two of the world’s most prestigious universities.
The series reveals Seamus Heaney’s role as a mentor, a scholar, a critic and a fearless champion of Irish literature at two the most revered centres of learning on Earth, Harvard and Oxford Universities. Presenter John Kelly travels to Harvard and Oxford to meet the students he taught and the colleagues he influenced, and to get a feel for these famous academic institutions which mark such crucial points on the arc of the poets’ life.
We look at the diverse experiences Seamus Heaney had at these two very different universities, and how the posts he held in each helped propel him on to become a poet of truly global status.
The two hour-long documentaries feature insightful contributions from fellow poets Andrew Motion and Tom Sleigh; from colleagues Bob Kiely, Neil Rudenstein and Bernard O’Donoghue; from critics and friends Helen Vendler and Blake Morrisson; and of course, from Seamus’s son Mick Heaney, who travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to show John Kelly around Heaney’s Harvard.
Part 1: Harvard – RTE Radio 1, 6pm on Saturday September 6, 2014.
In Part 1 of Professor Heaney, we get an insight into the poet’s life at Harvard.
His relationship with the university began in 1979 when he spent the spring semester teaching there, with his family. It also heralded the beginning of an enduring relationship with Harvard which allowed his creative life – away from academia – to flourish. In 1982, Harvard invited him to teach there for four months each year, giving him the space to dedicate the other eight months of the year to writing. In 1984 he was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, and latterly he was the appointed the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet-in-Residence.
But how did these annual stints as what he called an “emigrant worker” actually impact on him, and on the people he encountered? In this first part of the series, we meet the students he guided, and the colleagues and friends he worked with in the university’s illustrious English department. And we visit the places in Harvard that were important to Seamus Heaney, in the company of his eldest son, Mick.
RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday 6 September, 6pm