The Washington Post Investigates Joe Biden's Seamus Heaney Quote

At Washington Post, Teo Armus asks Stephanie Burt about the Seamus Heaney quote in Joe Biden's DNC speech. The passage, excerpted from Heaney's play, The Cure at Troy (a version of Sophocles's Philoctetes) goes: "History says / Don’t hope on this side of the grave / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme." The play's "multilayered connections to the past explain why its verses have been cited so often by political leaders," notes Burt. From there:

“They establish that our place in history isn’t just in one lifetime or one generation or one year or one century,” she said. “They establish that we and Heaney are a part of a Western history that goes back thousands of years and includes many kinds of stories.”

When one famous leader cites this kind of verse, she added, other figures and speechwriters might borrow it to pen new addresses.

But no one seems to have recited the line as often as Biden.

The former senator quoted it during his 2008 primary campaign, and at the 2013 memorial service for Sean Collier, a police officer killed following the Boston Marathon bombing. Biden did it again later that year, while addressing U.S.-Korea relations in Seoul, and during a 2014 visit to Cyprus.

Learn more at the Washington Post.