Today in our poetry news round up, we look at the Leopardi Library, the bid to link Robert Burns to Dumfries and Seamus Heaney 10 years after his death.
Leopardi Library Available on the Web
A huge library of works by Giacomo Leopardi, the 19th century Romantic poet and polymath, is now available online.
The library was put together for the most part by Count Monaldo, the poet’s father, and is now available to all fans of the man who is arguably the greatest poet to hail from Italy after Dante.
The library assisted the poet to boast his impressive knowledge of Greek, Latin and a number of other ancient languages. It is also believed that his voracious reading habits may well have contributed to the life long ill health from which he suffered.
Leopardi was born on 19th June 1798 and died on 14th June 1837. He was a poet, philosopher, philologist and essayist who is considered to be the greatest nineteenth century Italian poet and one of the most significant literary figures in the world, as well as one of the principle figures of the Romantic poetry movement.
Campaigners Bid to see Town Recognised as “True Home” of Robert Burns
A campaign in the South of Scotand has been launched that celebrates the links that the poet Robert Burns had with the region. Whilst it is widely recognised that the poet was born in the Ayrshire town of Alloway, he, in fact, spent much of his time in Dumfriesshire. It is the hope of the Burns Tourism Action Group that Dumfries could now be recognised as the true home of the Bard.
The group are being supported in their quest by the South of Scotland Destination Alliance and the Dumfries and Galloway Council and hope to increase the number of visitors who come to the area because of Burns.
Plans for the area include a new audio walking tours, new signange to all of the important Burns heritage sites and a guide portal. There will also be a series of QR codes across the town which will link to a website full of visitor information.
There are also plans for a Burns Quarter which will be located in the centre of Dumfries and will incorporate Old Bakery, The Globe Inn and the new museum and conference centre.
One of the initiators of the Burns Quarter stated that it was not simply about keeping the memory of the great poet alive but also a way of bringing his words to life.
Seamus Heaney 10 Years Later
The poet Seamus Heaney found fame early in life with the publication of his first collection at the age of 26. Thirty years after that he won a Nobel Prize for Literature, the fourth Irishman to do so, and followed in the footsteps of Yeats, Shaw and Beckett. When he died in 2013 sales of his books accounted for around 66% of the sales of contemporary poets within the UK.
A decade after his death his voice, his poetry, is still very much alive and his flame has not diminished in the slightest with new books about him being published and new developments taking place at new development taking place at HomePlace all the time.
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