Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney challenges WH Auden's statement that "Poetry makes nothing happen" in order to assert the key role that poetry has played throughout the 20th century.
He illustrates his talk with references to Osip Mandelstam , Dylan Thomas , WB Yeats, TS Eliot , Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath , and draws extensively on BBC archives. Seamus Heaney concludes with a rendering of his own poem written after the death of his friend and fellow-poet Joseph Brodsky. Repeat