Culture

Prospect online this week: Seamus Heaney and Dr Roget

November 28, 2008
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We have two pieces of a liteary bent new to our website this week: a review by the journalist Frieda Klotz of Dennis O’Driscoll's book of interviews with Nobel-laureate Seamus Heaney, and an article by author Lesley Chamberlain exploring the life of the man who gave the world its first and most renowned thesaurus, Dr Peter Mark Roget. In each of these very different cases, the limits of the "biographical fallacy" are made plain. In five years of interviews with O'Driscoll, Heaney discusses almost everything in his life apart from his poetry, leaving that to speak for itself (and implicitly rejecting the idea that it might be explained by looking at his life experiences). Chamberlain, meanwhile, notes that Roget's unhappy, neurotic and frequently dull life is hard to reconcile with the measured, fecund verbiage of his great work. As ever, let us know your own thoughts here.