Public Humanities

There are few poets who have captured the ear and the imagination of the world like Seamus Heaney. The Irish Studies Program celebrated its first decade in 2014 with the opening of Seamus Heaney: The Music of What Happens, the first exhibition dedicated to the Nobel prize winning poet since his untimely death in 2013. 

Reviewed here by Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times, the exhibition featured materials from the Heaney collection held in Emory’s Rose Library including manuscript drafts, rare illustrated books, photographs, and even the two planks of wood that he used as a desk where he wrote some of his celebrated poems.

One of the highlights of the exhibition was a media room with recordings of his poetry read by Heaney himself and by other poets and artists including world-renowned Irish actor Liam Neeson and novelist Salman Rushdie, whose papers are also held by the Rose Library:

"Ultimately, our hope is that visitors will come away from the exhibition with a renewed sense of how Heaney's poetry connects us to what matters in the everyday and the marvelous," Curator, Geraldine Higgins said, "I hope too that visitors will be inspired to pick up a book of Heaney's poems and lose themselves in the music of what happens."

• Take an online tour of The Music of What Happens here.
• View "Feeling Into Words: A Conversation about Seamus Heaney" with Fintan O'Toole, Fiona Ross and Bernard O'Donoghue, recorded at the exhibition opening in February 2014.
• View "Behind the Scenes at The Music of What Happens"  with Maggie Greaves, Geraldine Higgins and Emily Leithauser
• Read Maggie Greaves and Emily Leithauser on curating the exhibition.
• View 'A Tribute to Seamus Heaney in Poetry and Song' with Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, Vona Groarke, Geraldine Higgins, Nick Laird, William Corbett, Belinda McKeon, Kevin Young, and the Vega String Quartet.

In July 2018, the National Library of Ireland's (NLI) exhibition, Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again opened at a new cultural space in the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. Curated by Geraldine HigginsListen Now Again highlights the amazing literary archive at the NLI, donated by the Heaney family in 2011. Heaney himself loaded the boxes of material into his car and carried them into the library that he and so many Irish writers used and loved.

Listen Now Again follows the trajectory of Heaney’s poetry through the four elements, from the earth-bound bog poems of his early work to the airiness and uplift of crediting marvels in his later career. The exhibition reflects on the importance of listening, not just to the sound of Heaney’s poetry but to a music "that you never would have known to listen for."  Visitors are invited to explore how Heaney transforms the ordinary world into extraordinary words in an immersive, interactive exhibition filled with objects, photographs and original materials.

Listen Now Again will run at the Culture and Heritage Centre in the Bank of Ireland until 2025 before being relocated to its permanent home in the National Library of Ireland.

• Follow Listen Now Again on X ( twitter).
• Read reviews in the New York Times and the Irish Times.
• Listen to a 2018 interview about the exhibition on BBC Radio 4, Front Row, here.
• View a Rosemary Magee Creative Conversation with Marie and Catherine Heaney in Sept 2019.

In 2018, the Traveling version of the National Library of Ireland’s Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition visited Emory’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.

It offered a taste of the Dublin exhibition with panels and photographs from Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again.

Exhibit curator Geraldine Higgins, said that the traveling exhibit was planned to coincide with the 2024 Ellmann Lectures, which honored the 10th anniversary of Heaney’s death. The distinguished speakers, American poet Natasha Trethewey and Irish writer Fintan O’Toole, have strong scholarly ties to Heaney and lectured on the theme of Writing Lives, considering the relationship between art, life, and writing in various forms and contexts.

Heaney, a Noble Laureate in literature, gave the inaugural Ellmann lectures in 1988 and donated his lecture notes to the Rose Library, helping the library’s Irish literary collections to flourish into a world-renowned archive featuring many Irish authors.

"With this exhibit, I hope people will get a sense of the strong connections between Seamus Heaney, Ireland, and Emory, be inspired to explore the amazing archives in the Rose Library, and to visit the Listen Now Again exhibition if they’re ever in Dublin," Higgins said.