ReWind: when a poet blew in

Seamus Heaney’s appearance at the venue’s Jolliffe Studio Theatre was a major coup for poetry reading organiser Arthur Elliot, but the Irish poet was by no means the only major name who read there.

“Liverpool Poets” Roger McGough and Brian Patten were among those who appeared, as was future Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry winner Peter Porter.

Arthur Elliot told us: “The aim is to introduce people to poetry, because I think it is a very important method of communicating with fellow human beings. A well-written poem is an extremely fine means of communication. It tries to give ideas a form that is immediately evocative – look at television jingles.

“It is a very high-grade, intense form. It gives people a deeper insight because of its tightness and tension. Prose tends to be much more discursive.”

The Swindon Advertiser’s reviewer attended Heaney’s reading and was duly bowled over by the work and presence of the genius: “From the moment when Seamus Heaney introduced his first brief poem to his crowded audience, it was clear he was going to win the battle with the wind.

“Though the gusts howled and rattled the roof of the cosy Harold Jolliffe Studio Theatre last night, the poet’s relaxed and personal manner kept well over a hundred enthusiasts from Swindon and further afield enthralled.

“Seamus Heaney writes in a terse, tense language, wasting no words in his poems on elaborating their context.

“A new and vivid life is brought to them by having the author stand there and talk about where they came from, what inspired them, what his intention was in writing them and what this and that phrase refer to.”

By 1977 Seamus Heaney was already one of the world’s most acclaimed young poets, and beginning to feature in school English Literature courses.

A few years later he became a Professor at America’s most prestigious university, Harvard, and in 1995 added the Nobel Prize in Literature to his many accolades. He died in 2013, aged 74.