Dr. Andrew Auge, professor of English and director of the Irish studies minor at Loras College in Iowa, will give a lecture on “Seamus Heaney and Religion” at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 22, in the O’Shaughnessy Room (the Leather Room) of O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.
Dr. Andrew Auge
The lecture, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the university’s Center for Irish Studies and Center for Catholic Studies. Light refreshments will be served.
Auge is the author of A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism (Syracuse University Press, 2014) and serves as advisory editor for modern poetry for New Hibernia Review, the Irish studies journal published by St. Thomas.
Auge has written that “No Irish writer since James Joyce has more openly acknowledged the influence of Catholicism upon his work than Seamus Heaney.” Although critics argue about the exact nature of Heaney’s relationship to religion, Auge contends that taken as a whole, Heaney’s poetry always “makes room for the marvelous.”
Heaney, who died in 2013, was the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry and is recognized as Ireland’s pre-eminent modern poet. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
For more information, contact James Rogers at (651) 962-5662 or jrogers@stthomas.edu.
