JOE BIDEN HAS wrapped up a more than 50-year political career but promised that “we’re not leaving the fight” as he said farewell to the presidency and flew to California.

I had pulled from the shelf the U.K. version of “The Letters of Seamus Heaney,” published by Faber & Faber there in the late spring (and now here by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 800-plus pages ...

“It’s impossible, I think, to like poetry and not like Seamus Heaney,” offers Skinner, who counts Alexander Pope, Robert Frost and Gerard Manley Hopkins among his favourites.

Seamus Heaney lost his Catholic faith. But his poetry still sought transcendence. Paul Corcoran September 15, 2023 ...

But that is far from the only Yeats line that Biden has at the tip of his tongue. "Think where man's glory most begins and ends and say, my glory was I had such friends," Biden recited at a White ...

Read: Seamus Heaney’s journey into darkness The obvious comparison here is with 2007’s Letters of Ted Hughes, also edited by Christopher Reid.

Biden has frequently recited extracts from The Cure at Troy and quoted it during his acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. He posted his latest recital of Heaney's famous ...

In his 1995 Nobel lecture, Heaney spoke of poetry’s “gift for telling truth” – and beyond that, its capacity “to be not only pleasurably right, but compellingly wise”.

In this season of discontent in American society, however, Heaney’s words have become emblematic of President Biden’s greatest political challenge: to act as healer-in-chief.