Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has been judged by Robert Lowell to be the most important Irish poet since Yeats. This classic program looks back over Heaney’s career at the time his best-selling collection Seeing Things—a return to the rural childhood territory of his very first book—was published, offering a rare opportunity to hear the poet read and discuss his work. Through poems including "Death of a Naturalist," "The Toome Road," "Wheels Within Wheels," "The Strand at Lough Beg" and "Seeing Things," he describes his efforts to balance losses with life’s marvels, the lyrical with the elegiac, and social responsibility with creative freedom in a society divided by religion and politics. (52 minutes)