Daniel Tobin

Daniel Tobin has published numerous essays on poetry and poetics in journals like The Writer’s Chronicle, New Hibernia Review, Befrois, and Etudes Irlandais, and others, many of which have been reprinted in essay collections such as The Measured Word and Complexities of Motion. His book, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, is regarded as the foremost study of religious motifs in Irish the Nobel laureate's work. His essay “Beyond Maps and Atlases: Transfiguration and Immanence in the Later Poems of Seamus Heaney” takes up the subject in Heaney's later work, and appears with essays by other major Heaney scholars in “The Soul Exceeds its circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O’Brien. Awake in America appeared in 2011, also to wide praise. “This incisive and moving critique of poetry and tradition pushes the frontiers of Irish Studies,” Joseph Lennon observed, and it challenges “scholars and readers to survey a new country of Irishness, at once inner, ardent and textual.” In On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence, Tobin takes on the largest questions of meaning and durability of language turned to art in the wake of postmodernism. Rosanna Warren called it “a complex, sophisticated, and magnanimous book,” and Bruce Bond hailed it as a book of “unflinching sobriety and daring [in a] conversation too often shrill with hyperbole or lackluster with a chronic failure to commit... a smart and beautiful book.”

Daniel Tobin (born January 13, 1958) is an American poet, scholar, editor, and essayist, and the winner of numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Books Award, and the Julia Ward Howe Award, among many others.