On display in the Irish Room of the Burns Library are busts of the four Irish writers who have received the Nobel Prize for Literature: (l-r) Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett. The busts are featured in Mr. Shaw’s Time Is Filled Up for Months to Come, the first public exhibition of materials from the Burns Library’s Samuel N. Freedman George Bernard Shaw Collection, which was acquired in 2002 and includes more than 3,400 objects. When the exhibition opened in November, Freedman donated the clay Shaw bust (the others are made of bronze). Presented in the exhibition are original manuscripts, selections from Shaw’s personal correspondence, playbills, first editions, paintings, and photographs. The busts are on permanent display at the library, but the exhibition closes on April 29, 2005.
The Swedish Academy, which selects the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, described its reasons for recognizing each writer: Heaney, in 1995, “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”; Yeats, in 1923, “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”; Shaw, in 1925, “for his work, which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty”; and Beckett, in 1969, “for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.” Read more about the exhibition and the Burns Library’s 20th-century Irish literature collections.