A Study Guide for Seamus Heaney's "Follower"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Seamus Heaney's "Follower," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535823456

Book preview

08

Follower

Seamus Heaney

1966

Introduction

Follower was first published in Seamus Heaney's 1966 anthology Death of a Naturalist. This first book of Heaney's career established his reputation as a poet almost overnight, and Follower is usually singled out as among the finest poems in that volume and among the most important of Heaney's poems from throughout his career. It establishes the main themes of Heaney's work, a poetry that is rooted in a sense of place in the rural Ireland of his boyhood and that laments the loss of old traditions that inevitably disappear among modern ways of life. Heaney considers that his family's traditional connection to the land and work as peasant farmers has come to an end in the modern world and must be continued by transformation into poetry. He uses the scholarly metaphor of pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants to suggest his indebtedness as a writer to his forebears' tradition of labor. He has since shaped a career based on navigation between tradition and the modern world, and on the transformation and translation of works of mythic tradition into modern English.

Follower has been widely republished in literary anthologies and in collections of Heaney's works, for instance in Heaney's Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996.

Author Biography

Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on the family farm of Mossbawn in County Derry, Northern Ireland. His family was Catholic, part of the minority population in Northern Ireland. He initially attended the local parish school, but soon won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a prestigious Catholic boarding school in the city of Derry. He went on to take a First in English (the equivalent of an American bachelor's degree with honors) from the Queen's University of Belfast in 1961. He worked for two years on a teaching degree at St. Joseph's Teacher Training College,