It's strange and unexpected, but also appropriate and heartening, that Beowulf—ground zero for literature in English—would become a bestseller at the dawn of the 21st century. Why becomes less of a ...

What literary text could seem further from reality these days than Beowulf — that approximately 1,500-year-old Anglo Saxon verse epic about a Scandinavian hero fighting monsters that’s known mainly by ...

As mentioned in Good Morning News, the renowned Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has died. I had plenty of his poetry foisted upon me in my senior high school English class, and various obituaries and ...

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times. As seen in a new collection, “The Translations of Seamus Heaney,” the Nobel laureate was a prolific and skilled interpreter of other ...

Seamus Heaney died today at age 74. He was considered Ireland’s foremost poet since William Butler Yeats and he won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. His translation of “Beowulf” made the Old ...

Within the confines of a cramped rehearsal room, the stirring story of the warrior Beowulf rolls off the tongue of award-winning actor Johnny Lee Davenport. As Davenport describes preparing for his ...

As the title suggests, this new collection from the 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize is a study in balance. Heaney reveals how simple things, such as a thimble or a swing, can hold the weight of history ...

Acclaimed actor Ben Whishaw will visit 92NY's Unterberg Poetry Center on Wednesday, May 3 at 7:30 pm to deliver a dramatic reading of literary classics and poems translated over the years by the late, ...

What is the opposite of poetry? What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power—in the middle of the night, in ...