Irish Boston History & Heritage

Seamus Heaney & Robert Frost This essay appeared in The Boston Globe, October 25, 2002 By Michael Quinlin Robert Frost would appreciate knowing that the road less traveled leads to Lawrence , which is where Ireland 's esteemed poet Seamus Heaney plans to read tomorrow evening. Frost, New England 's favorite poet, spent his formative years in this industrial city, where he got his education, worked in a woolen mill, and learned to chisel the emotions, thoughts, and words of New Englanders into a poetic form as beautiful and enduring as the landscape. When he died in 1963 at 89, Frost had written nine books of poetry, four of them winning Pulitzer Prizes. He received the Congressional Medal from John F. Kennedy, and was the first poet invited to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration, a magnificent gesture from a president "not afraid of grace and beauty." Frost's preference for Yankee individualism in lieu of the homogeneity of...

Photo Courtesy of Irish America Magazine On October 15, 1917, famed Irish tenor  John McCormack  sang at the Boston Opera House to a packed audience of 4,000 of his fans.  As always, McCormack played a wide-selection of music to embody his classical training and his native traditions. During the concert, he performed works by Handel, Schubert and Brahms, as well as classic Irish melodies such as  Mother Machree , co-written by   Chauncey Olcott and Ernest Ball  and Sweet Kitty Malone by Hugh Dunbar Hargrave .  McCormack's final encore was the hit song, I Hear You Calling Me by Harold Harford and Charles Marshall.     The   Irish Music Collection   at Boston College's John J. Burns Library has an important collection of materials about John McCormack.  And the   Archival Collection  at Boston Symphony Hall has  programs from McCormack's concerts between 1911 and 1936, plus various newspaper clipping...