Heaney, Seamus (13 April 1939 - )

views updated

Seamus Heaney (13 April 1939 - )

Brendan Corcoran
Indiana State University

1995 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech

Heaney: Banquet Speech

Press Release: The Nobel Prize for Literature 1995

Heaney: Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1995

See also the Heaney entries in DLB 40: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland Since 1960 and DLB Yearbook 1995.

BOOKS: Eleven Poems (Belfast: Festival Publications, Queen’s University, 1965);

Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966; New York: Oxford University Press, 1966);

Room to Rhyme, by Heaney, David Hammond, and Michael Longley (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1968);

A Lough Neagh Sequence, edited by Harry Chambers and Eric J. Morten (Manchester, U.K.: Phoenix Pamphlets Poets Press, 1969);

Door into the Dark (London: Faber & Faber, 1969; New York: Oxford University Press, 1969);

Wintering Out (London: Faber & Faber, 1972; New York: Oxford University Press, 1973);

The Fire i’ the Flint: Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1975);

Stations (Belfast: Ulsterman, 1975);

North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975; New York: Oxford University Press, 1976);

Bog Poems (London: Rainbow Press, 1975);

Glanmore Sonnets (Hamburg, Germany: Editions Monika Beck, 1977);

In Their Element: A Selection of Poems, by Heaney and Derek Mahon (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1977);

Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address and Elegy (Boston & London: Faber & Faber, 1978);

Field Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979);

Gravities: A Collection of Poems and Drawings, by Heaney and Noel Connor (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Charlotte Press, 1979);

Hedge School: Sonnets from Glanmore (Salem, Ore.: Charles Seluzicki, 1979);

Selected Poems 1965–1975 (Boston & London: Faber & Faber, 1980); republished as Poems: 1965–1975 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980);

Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber & Faber, 1980; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980);

Poems and a Memoir, edited by Henry Pearson (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1982);

A Personal Selection: August 20 - October 24, 1982 (Belfast: Ulster Museum, 1982);

Among Schoolchildren: A Lecture Dedicated to the Memory of John Malone (Belfast: John Malone Memorial Committee, 1983);

An Open Letter (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1983);

Hailstones (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1984);

Station Island (London: Faber & Faber, 1984; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985);

Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland (Grasmere, U.K.: Trustees of Dove Cottage, 1985);

The Haw Lantern (London: Faber & Faber, 1987; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987);

The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber & Faber, 1988); republished as The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988);

The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989);

New Selected Poems, 1966–1987 (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990);

Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991); excerpt published as Squarings: A Sequence of Forty-Eight Poems (San Francisco: Arion, 2003);

Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin, W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture (Swansea, U.K.: University College of Swansea, 1993);

The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber & Faber, 1995; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995);

Crediting Poetry (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1995; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996);

The Spirit Level (London: Faber & Faber, 1996; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996);

Homage to Robert Frost, by Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996; London: Faber & Faber, 1997);

Audenesque (Paris: Maeght Editeur, 1998);

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1998; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998);

Electric Light (London: Faber & Faber, 2001; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001);

Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002);

“Room to Rhyme”: “Greatest Minds Lecture” Delivered at the Celebration of Graduation at the University of Dundee, July 2003 (Dundee, U.K.: University of Dundee, 2004);

Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay (Dublin: Town-House, 2004);

The Testament of Cresseid: A Retelling of Robert Henryson’s Poem (London: Enithermon, 2004);

District & Circle (London: Faber & Faber, 2006; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).

SELECTED BROADSIDES: Boy Driving His Father to Confession (Farnham, U.K.: Sceptre Press, 1970);

Night Drive (Crediton, U.K.: Richard Gilbertson, 1970);

Servant Boy (Detroit: Red Hanrahan Press, 1971);

After Summer (Old Deerfield, Mass.: Deerfield Press / Dublin: Gallery Press, 1978);

Toome (Dublin: National College of Art and Design, 1980);

Sweeney Praises the Trees (New York: Henry Pearson, 1981);

From the Republic of Conscience (Dublin: Amnesty International, 1985);

The Tree Clock (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 1990);

Keeping Going (Concord, N.H.: Bow and Arrow Press, 1993).

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philodetes, Deny, U.K., Guildhall Derry, 1 October 1990; New York: Unterberg Poetry Center, 15 March 1993;

The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 31 March 2004.

RECORDINGS: The Northern Muse, by Heaney and John Montague, Dublin, Claddagh Records, 1968;

The Rough Field, by Heaney, Montague, Benedict Kiely, Tom MacGurk, and Patrick Magee, Dublin, Claddagh Records, 1973;

Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin, introduced by Craig Raine, London, Faber & Faber, 1983;

Stepping Stones: Selected Poems, New York, Penguin Audio-books, 1995;

The Spirit Level, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996;

Station Island, London, Faber & Faber/Penguin Audio-books, 1997;

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, by Heaney, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, and Robert Pinsky, New York, Penguin Audiobooks, 1998;

Beowulf, London, Penguin, 1999; St. Paul, Minn., High-Bridge, 2000;

Electric Light, London, Penguin, 2000.

OTHER: New Poems, 1970–1971, edited by Heaney, Alan Brownjohn, and Jon Stallworthy (London: Hutchinson, 1971);

Soundings: An Annual Anthology of New Irish Poetry, edited by Heaney (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1972);

Soundings II, edited by Heaney (Belfast: Blacks taff Press, 1974);

“A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on the Irish Literary Revival,” in Irish Studies I, edited by P. J. D. Drury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 1–20;

The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Heaney and Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1982; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982);

The Essential Wordsworth, edited by Heaney (New York: Ecco Press, 1988);

“Correspondences: Emigrants and Inner Exiles,” in Migration: The Irish at Home and Abroad, edited by Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1989), pp. 21–31;

“William Butler Yeats (1865–1939),” in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, volume 2, edited by Seamus Deane (Derry, U.K.: Field Day, 1991), pp. 783–790;

“For Liberation: Brian Friel and the Use of Memory,” in The Achievement of Brian Friel, edited by Alan J. Peacock (Buckinghamshire, U.K.: C. Smythe, 1993), pp. 229–240;

The School Bag, edited by Heaney and Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1997);

W. B. Yeats: Poems, edited by Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2000);

William Wordsworth: Poems, edited by Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).

TRANSLATIONS: Ugolino, from Dante’s Inferno (Dublin: Andrew Carpenter, 1979);

Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (Derry, U.K.: Field Day Theatre Company, 1983; London: Faber & Faber, 1984; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984); revised, with photographs by Rachel Giese, as Sweeney’s Flight (London: Faber & Faber, 1992; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992);

Sophocles, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Derry, U.K.: Field Day, 1990; London: Faber & Faber, 1990; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991);

The Midnight Verdict, based on translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oiche (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1993);

Jan Kochanowski, Laments, translated by Heaney and Stanislaw Baranczak (London: Faber & Faber, 1995; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995);

Leos Janácek and Ozef Kalda, Diary of One Who Vanished: A Song Cycle (London: Faber & Faber, 1999; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000);

Beowulf (London: Faber & Faber, 1999; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999);

Sophocles, The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone (London: Faber & Faber, 2004; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004).

SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS–UNCOLLECTED: “Out of London: Ulster’s Troubles,” New Statesman, 1 July 1966, pp. 23–24;

“Old Derry’s Walls,” Listener, 24 October 1968, pp. 521–523;

“The Poetry of John Hewitt,” Threshold, no. 22 (Summer 1969);

“A Poet’s Childhood,” Listener, 11 November 1971, pp. 660–661;

“The Trade of an Irish Poet,” Guardian, 25 May 1972;

“Deep as England,” Hibernia, 1 December 1972, p. 13;

“Seamus Heaney Recalls When Li’l Abner Breezed in from Castledawson,” Education Times, 20 December 1973;

“John Bull’s Other Island,” Listener, 29 September 1977;

“The Interesting Case of John Alphonsus Mulrennan,” Planet, 41 (1978): 34–37;

“Treely and Rurally,” Quarto, 9 (August 1980): 14;

“English and Irish,” TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 24 October 1980, p. 1199;

“Above the Brim: On Robert Frost,” Salmagundi, 88—89 (Fall 1990—Winter 1991): 275—294;

“The Sense of the Past,” History Ireland, 1 (Winter 1993): 33–37;

“Time and Time Again: Poetry and the Millennium,” European English Messenger, 10 (Autumn 2001): 19–23;

“The Trance and the Translation,” Guardian, 30 November 2002, pp. 4, 6;

“A Story that Sings Down the Centuries,” London Sunday Times, 21 March 2004, p. 41.

In October 1995 the Swedish Academy announced that it had awarded Seamus Heaney the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” The poet, who was vacationing in Greece, was unaware of this honor until the following day when he received word from family in Ireland. The Swedish Academy’s announcement emphasized two interconnected aspects of Heaney’s work as a poet, essayist, and translator: his profound connection to the people, language, and place of his upbringing in rural Ulster, and his persistent “analysis of violence in Northern Ireland.” Many of his poems reflect the violent times in which he has lived or explicitly address world and Irish history, including, notably, the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland. That said, Heaney’s work also attests to the fact that he is far more than the “laureate of violence,” a title given to him by Ciaran Carson in an Honest Ulsterman (Winter 1975) review of Heaney’s 1975 volume North. One of the most respected aspects of Heaney’s writing in poetry and prose is his lifelong struggle to discern the necessary relationship of art to life.

Heaney is widely acknowledged as one of the most popular and important poets of the late twentieth century. For decades, his work has validated the local, whether in terms of language, place, customs, characters, history, or mythology—and in doing so it has dealt with what Counties poet Patrick Kavanagh calls “the fundamentals.” Heaney’s worldwide readership has come to know his home ground, whether in Counties Derry or Wicklow, as not just the locus of wells, bogs, and the implements, rhythms, and characters of rural Ireland, but as a place where the literary imagination responds to fundamental challenges afflicting individuals and societies.

Much of his early poetry through Door into the Dark (1969) revisits Heaney’s native ground through recollections of childhood in Mossbawn, the farm he grew up on and a place he sees as suspended “between the archaic and the modern,” as he wrote in Crediting Poetry, his 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech. As a locus for Heaney’s early poetic imagination, Mossbawn was situated between a timeless, idyllic past and current social turmoil; yet, it is precisely this status as a place in between contradictory forces that relates to one of Heaney’s core concerns: namely, as he wrote in the essay “Something” (included in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001, 2002), “the subject of boundaries and borders and frontiers and divisions.”

Seamus Justin Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 on a fifty-acre farm near the shores of Lough Neagh in County Derry. He was the oldest of nine children born to Patrick and Margaret Heaney, who were Catholic. In discussing the etymology of Mossbawn in his 1972 essay “Belfast,” Heaney says that “in the syllables of my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster.... I was symbolically placed between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between ‘the desmesne’ and ‘the bog.’”

After attending the local Anahorish School from 1944 to 1951, Heaney left Mossbawn to study from 1951 to 1957 at St. Columb’s College in Derry city. Growing up reading the stories of Celtic heroes and studying the Irish language for six years at school, Heaney was disposed from an early age to develop a markedly Irish identity in a state where the majority saw themselves as British. His attendance at the Catholic boarding school, where he studied both Irish and Latin, solidified his cultural and religious affiliations. Along with other illustrious late-1950s graduates of St. Columb’s—including the scholar Seamus Deane, the politician John Hume, and the political activist Eamonn McCann-Heaney benefited from the 1947 Northern Ireland Education Act, which opened up quality secondary and university education to rural, urban, and often Catholic working classes. After graduating with honors from St. Columb’s, Heaney earned a prestigious scholarship to attend Queens University, Belfast, from 1957 to 1961. There he studied Anglo-Saxon and developed a taste for the linguistic intensity of writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Webster, John Keats, and especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, even as he maintained close connections to his family and parish life back home. At this time, Heaney began to write poetry and try his hand at publication. Under the pen name “Incertus,” some of his earliest poems were published in the student literary magazines Gorgon and Q

Though he graduated from Queens with first-class honors in English language and literature, a literary and scholarly life was in no way certain for Heaney. Despite encouragement to continue graduate work at Oxford—he had always assumed he would become a secondary-school teacher–Heaney opted to continue his studies for a teacher’s diploma at St. Joseph’s College of Education in Andersontown, Belfast. During this year, he also encountered the work of several contemporary Irish poets, notably John Hewitt, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Richard Murphy. In autumn 1962 Heaney began teaching at St. Thomas’s Intermediate School in Ballymurphy, Belfast, where the headmaster, the short-story writer Michael McLaverty, lent Heaney a complete volume of Kavanagh’s poetry. In a 1977 interview with Deane, Heaney said that from Kavanagh he learned “that my local County Derry experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to ‘the modern world,’ was to be trusted.”

The other poet who gave Heaney confidence in the poetic validity of his own experiences was Ted Hughes. In a 1979 interview with James Randall, Heaney recalled his November 1962 encounter with Hughes’s Lupercal (1960) in the Belfast Public Library. Having grown up on a farm where pigs were slaughtered, Heaney said that he read Hughes’s “View of a Pig” and “suddenly, the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life.” He added, “I had had some notion that modern poetry was far beyond the likes of me–there was Eliot and so on–so I got this thrill out of trusting my own background, and I started [writing poetry in earnest] about a year later.” This affection for Hughes’s work led to a close friendship with the English poet in the early 1970s, a relationship that continued until Hughes’s death in 1998. The same month he discovered Hughes’s work, Heaney placed his poem “Tractors” in his first nonuniversity publication, the Belfast Telegraph. Other poems, including “Midterm Break,” were published shortly thereafter in various Irish periodicals.

In autumn 1963 Heaney began teaching English literature at St. Joseph’s College. At this time he came to know Philip Hobsbaum, a new lecturer at Queens University and a poet who also took a great interest in Hughes’s poetry. Hobsbaum, who had organized from 1955 to 1962 a writing workshop known as the Group in Cambridge and London, was forming a similar gathering of writers in Belfast. The Belfast Group brought together such soon-to-be prominent figures as Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, James Simmons, and Stewart Parker. Hobsbaum’s Belfast Group sessions continued until 1966, when Heaney took over organizational responsibilities. Though Group meetings ceased entirely in 1972, at a time of profound political turmoil and violence, Heaney’s sessions similarly offered encouragement to such younger writers as Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Frank Ormsby. In addition to providing the poets with opportunities to read and critique each other’s work, these meetings fostered many significant personal and literary friendships that have sustained a community of poets in Northern Ireland.

Heaney’s first volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), consists of many poems, including “Digging,” “Blackberry Picking,” and “Personal Helicon,” that were first publicly presented at Group sessions. Hobsbaum not only nurtured poetic talent, he promoted it. In 1964 he ensured that various London editors received a selection of Heaney’s poetry. “Digging” was immediately accepted by the New Statesman and published in December 1964. Having himself submitted a book manuscript titled “Advancements of Learning” to the Dolmen Press in Ireland in late 1964, Heaney was astounded to receive a letter of solicitation from Faber and Faber in January 1965. As a result of this offer, he withdrew “Advancements of Learning” from Dolmen, and an enlarged and revised version of the manuscript (now titled Death of a Naturalist) was accepted in late summer, around the time of his marriage to teacher and journalist Marie Devlin on 5 August 1965. The volume was published by Faber and Faber in May 1966.

The volume was well received both in Ireland and in Britain, with many reviewers noting an originality and poise that bespoke genuine literary promise. Along with the critical praise for Death of a Naturalist, Heaney received the Gregory Award for young writers, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Death of a Naturalist launched not only Heaney’s poetic career but his lifelong affiliation with the academy: he began teaching at Queens University, Belfast, in autumn 1966. This involvement with institutions of higher learning, including St. Joseph’s, Queens, Carysfort, Harvard, Oxford, and Emory Universities, exemplifies not only Heaney’s early vocational commitment to teaching but his professional interest in literary scholarship.

In Death of a Naturalist, most notably in the first and last poems (“Digging” and “Personal Helicon”), Heaney voices many of the images, themes, and stylistic maneuvers that have come to define his poetry. According to Rand Brandes, “Digging” is “a synecdoche of sorts for the poet’s entire oeuvre.” A poem about the poetic vocation, it imagines the poet apart from, yet umbilically attached to, his source, be it the ancestors, the home, or the earth itself. Above all, this poem introduces the image of digging as a protean figure for the procedures of poetry: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” The idea of digging to some degree governs Heaney’s first five books of poetry. In a 1981 interview with John Haffenden, Heaney said: “I’m certain that up to North, that that was one book; in a way it grows together and goes together.”

“Personal Helicon” shows the poet not digging but descending into the literal earth he knows and into the self or personal memory. At the outset of the poem, Heaney exposes the child’s sense of wonder at not only the human contrivances, the “old pumps with buckets and windlasses,” used for drawing fresh water out of the earth, but also the more mysterious qualities of a well, its “dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.” The title refers to the home of the Greek poet Hesiod, to whom the Muses appeared on Mount Helicon; the poem establishes the well as a literal site of Heaney’s poetic inspiration and a larger figure for the processes of poetry that delve into the common stuff of the world and human lives so as to draw out something meaningful.

Shortly after the publication of Death of a Naturalist, the Heaneys’ first son, Michael, was born. A second son, Christopher, arrived in 1968, and their daughter, Catherine Ann, was born in 1973. As his family grew, Heaney continued work as a lecturer at Queens and increasingly contributed literary journalism to various periodicals. He also made frequent public appearances on BBC radio and television. The poetry collected in his second volume, Door into the Dark, continued many of the same images and themes of his first book. In poems such as “Thatcher” or the mysterious and tentatively political “Lough Neagh Sequence,” dedicated to the local eel fishermen, Heaney not only continues the self-examination apparent in “Personal Helicon” but confirms one of the chief assets of his poetry: the extraordinary attention to precise description of rural life.

One of the most important developments of Door into the Dark involves Heaney’s identification of the bog as both “a genuine obsession,” as he commented in the interview with Randall, and another landscape crucial to his poetry. “Bogland,” the final poem of the volume, presents what Heaney (in a 2000 interview with Mike Murphy) called “a ‘going through’ experience.” He said the poem is “about equating Irish experience to some extent with the bogs,” adding, “It was not autobiographical. It was beyond me in a good way, and that was a terrific confirmation. It was a second growthring for me.” This poem begins with the “encroaching horizon” of the Irish landscape that coalesces in the bogs’ liquefaction of solid ground and the human endeavor to excavate the incompletely defined strata for turf and whatever else the bog as natural time capsule might yield up.

Included in Door into the Dark is “Requiem for the Croppies,” a poem written for the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising. Heaney’s poem roots the 1916 rebellion in the United Irishmen’s uprising against the British in 1798. This poem displays both Heaney’s nationalist leanings and his abiding concern for how poetry addresses historical circumstance. The proper intersection of art and life became increasingly difficult to ascertain as the Catholic Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s was opposed violently by Protestant Loyalists in 1968, setting off the sectarian violence of the Troubles. Speaking to his friend Deane in 1979, Heaney explained that growing up in a “mixed” area, where “Protestants and Catholics lived in proximity to and in harmony with one another,” he acquired “a kind of double awareness of division and, at the same time, of a courtesy that wasn’t quite a duplicity.” This intimate awareness of divisions between people is conveyed in “The Other Side” from Wintering Out (1972), a poem that also expresses the mutual desire of Catholic and Protestant neighbors to transcend perceived cultural differences.

Yet, the sectarian violence in late-1960s Northern Ireland confirmed and intensified the old distrust between Protestants and Catholics, Unionists and Nationalists. The British Army’s introduction into Northern Ireland and the establishment of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1969 exacerbated tensions. In Belfast until late summer 1970, when he left Queens University for a year as a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Heaney lived in the midst of Ulster’s violence. Conditioned by an early awareness of borders and divisions as well as the opportunities and risks of occupying in-between positions, Heaney’s “Catholic and nationalist” identification nonetheless posed a challenge to the artist’s equanimity, as he told Deane. Though criticized in some quarters for not vociferously confronting the political crisis, Wintering: Out, in Neil Corcoran’s view, addresses “if not the conflict itself, then the context out of which that conflict sprang.” According to Michael Parker, the volume depicts “the origins and hinterland of the conflict... through elegiac poems celebrating the identity, history, territory and tongue of his people, the Northern Catholic Irish.”

The dedication of Wintering Out is addressed to Heaney’s friends, the musician David Hammond and the poet Longley. Acknowledging the contemporary reality of killings and the August 1971 imposition of extrajudicial internment–the British Army policy of arresting and imprisoning suspected IRA sympathizers–this dedication introduces a subtly political volume that marks a watershed in the relation of Heaney’s poetry to the contemporary situation. The volume remains haunted by memory, what Heaney calls in a poem of the same name, “the backward look.” Other poems throughout the dominant first section similarly evoke a strong sense of the artifactual and the linguistic past. Poems such as “Traditions,” “A New Song,” and the sequence “Gifts of Rain” delve into the powerful unity of “locale” and “utterance” that links the deep past with the present.

In “Feeling into Words,” a 1974 essay included in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968—1978 (1980), Heaney states that as the violence took off in 1969, “the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.” He explains how he discovered “some of these emblems . . . in a book that was published in English translation, appositely, the year the killing started, in 1969.” This book was P. V. Glob’s The Bog People, a study of ritualized killing in Iron Age Jutland based upon the remarkably well-preserved evidence of corpses unearthed in bogs. The detailed and graphic photographs of these bodies offered Heaney images that became not just corollaries for the contemporary violence but figures embodying the human need to seek meaning from meaningless death. Parker points out that Glob’s text raises key issues, such as “landscape, religion, sexuality, violence, history, myth,” that dominate both Wintering Out and North. Though Heavy’s interest in The Bog People shadows the entire period during which he wrote Wintering Out, “The Tollund Man” is the only poem in the volume that addresses Glob’s images. The poem ends with an imaginative identification with the Tollund Man just before his murder. Ever attentive to place names, Heaney envisions “Saying the names // Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,” and experiencing in the imagined present “something” of that unimaginable yet universally human instant when mortality is consummated.

Though the rural Ulster phrase “to winter out” means “to see through and survive a crisis,” during the period from 1972 until the publication of North in 1975 the violence in Northern Ireland intensified. In the bloodiest year of the Troubles, 1972, all sides entrenched hard-line positions and resigned themselves to the intractability of the political crisis. Thus, in the title poem from North, Heaney concludes by harkening to the sibylline voice of the Viking “longship’s swimming tongue” warning of the terrible momentum of revenge. This voice reminds the poet that simply waiting out the crisis will not do; he must somehow respond.

In order to “put the practice of poetry more deliberately at the centre of my life” and avoid being cast as a “spokesman for the Catholic minority” in a time of crisis, as he recalls in Preoccupations, Heaney chose to resign from Queens in spring 1972 and accept the offer of renting an inexpensive house in County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland. For a poet who had already achieved substantial notoriety in the North, this move was viewed by many as a political gesture emphasizing Heaney’s Irish cultural identity over his officially British nationality. Heaney’s uprooting move to the South in the months before the publication of Wintering Out defines not only the writing of North but the critical response to this volume, Heaney’s most popular and frequently taught. In the Murphy interview, Heaney said: “You can’t get away from answerability, either to your time or your calling, but it’s the way you answer that’s the important thing. . . . North is a very oblique and intense book. It was fused at a very high pressure and had to do with all of my past, really, up until that stage.”

Beginning the volume with “Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication for Mary Heaney” (a beloved aunt), the poet casts an affectionate and nostalgic gaze back to his place of origin, where love and warmth are nonetheless tinctured by what he calls “a sunlit absence.” This more personal retrospection is further wrenched into the present crisis when Heaney says in “Funeral Rites” that: “Now as news comes in / of each neighbourly murder / we pine for ceremony, / customary rhythms.” Heaney’s desire to find a way not merely to represent but to mourn and memorialize the bloodshed in the North is fulfilled in the sequence of bog body poems that, in following from the earlier experiment with “The Tollund Man,” dominate the first section of the book. “Come to the Bower,” “Bog Queen,” “The Grauballe Man,” “Punishment,” and “Strange Fruit” each explore the ability of poetry to encompass both the individuality and the generic anonymity of the deaths figured by the bog bodies.

In “Punishment,” Heaney begins by empathetically identifying with a young murdered woman whose corpse had been preserved in a Jutland bog. The poet recognizes this figure as a “scapegoat” akin to the contemporary images of young Catholic women who were publicly humiliated and tortured for consorting with British soldiers in Northern Ireland. Yet, in a self-indicting gesture that is replicated at various times in his career, Heaney admits to being “an artful voyeur,” who “would have cast... the stones of silence.” He goes on to indict not only his own silence before contemporary atrocity but his own capacity to comprehend “the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.”

Heaney’s efforts to express how Glob’s images might be “hung in the scales / with beauty and atrocity” has led to both effusive praise and charges that these poems aestheticize and potentially demean the brutal actuality “of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped,” whether in the Iron Age or the late twentieth century. Despite the attention North received in Ireland, Britain, and the United States, Heaney recalled in the Randall interview that in a letter to Brian Friel shortly after publication of the book, he declared that he “no longer wanted a door into the dark–I wanted a door into the light” that would free him “to be able to use the first person singular” in reference to his personal life and time. Such a yearning for release is reflected in “Exposure,” the concluding poem in North. This poem examines Heaney’s notion of the poet as hero, “His gift like a slingstone / Whirled for the desperate,” but it then bluntly asks: “How did I end up like this?” Though ensconced in the tranquility of Wicklow, Heaney suspected that the cost of sustained political engagement is a loss of appreciation for what he later termed the “marvelous.”

While North ends with a note of self-doubt and wistful regret, Field Work (1979), despite a more overtly elegiac air, opens out into a more freewheeling appreciation of poetry as personal expression: “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.” Heaney demonstrates his dual sense of poetry as not only “self-delighting” and “inventive” linguistic expression but “a representation of things in the world.” The dual role of poetry in the world has fascinated Heaney across his entire career; in his first Oxford lecture in 1989 (published in 1995), he finally defines this antithetical aspect as the “redress of poetry.”

Early in Field Work Heaney continues to confront the ongoing Troubles in various poems including “Triptych,” “The Toome Road,” and the major elegies “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “A Postcard from North Antrim,” and “Casualty.” This last elegy, written in memory of Louis O’Neill, a Catholic fisherman and acquaintance of Heaney, movingly catalogues the poet’s admiring observations of this solitary drinker whose “deadpan sidling tact . . . fisherman’s quick eye / And turned observant back” were “blown to bits” by an IRA bomb detonated as a reprisal for the Bloody Sunday murders of thirteen civil-rights demonstrators in Deny. Heaney uses this eel fisherman’s individuality to at once mourn his death and indict the vulgar pointlessness of such violence. This elegy also points to the manner in which Heaney’s later poetry, most notably in Station Island (1984), presents lyric encounters with the dead who instruct, critique, and provoke the living poet. “The Strand at Lough Beg” creates a similarly Dantesque encounter with the dead, this time Heaney’s cousin Colum McCartney, a victim of random sectarian assassination.

Though “Singing School” in North opens with epigraphs from William Butler Yeats and William Wordsworth, and “Exposure” alludes to the Russian “inner àmigrà” Osip Mandelstam, the more archeological and even documentary rhetoric of North is not as infused with the voices of other poets as might be expected given that Heaney intensely studied Dante, Yeats, Mandelstam, and Robert Lowell while in Glanmore (1972—1975). Dante’s importance to Heaney is underscored by the decision to close Field Work with “Ugolino,” Heaney’s translation of Cantos 32 and 33 of the Inferno (also published separately in 1979). Written in May 1978, “Ugolino” presents a scene of cannibalistic loathing and despair that suits the larger mood of building crisis after IRA prisoners began the late 1976 “blanket protest,” which led to the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. “The Strand at Lough Beg” also makes direct reference to the mythogical Irish king Sweeney. Upon arriving in Wicklow, Heaney had begun to translate the medieval Buile Suibhne, an Irish long poem about the peregrinations of the mad, bird-like king haunted and cursed by his experiences of war. Fearing that the first effort at translation incorporated too much contemporary reference, Heaney stopped work on the project until 1979. It was eventually published as Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish in 1983. Both “Ugolino” and Sweeney Astray point to the central role of translation in general and, in particular, the presence of other poets’ voices in Heaney’s work from the mid 1970s onward.

By 1975 Heaney decided to return to teaching. When he accepted a job in the English Department at Carysfort Teachers’ Training College, where he served as department chairman from 1976 to 1981, the family left Glanmore and purchased a house in Sandymount, Dublin. Heaney’s sequence “Glanmore Sonnets,” positioned at the center of Field Work, commemorates this crucial time during which Heaney confirmed his vocation as a poet and further deepened his relationship to the Irish, English, American, and European poetic traditions. The first of ten sonnets celebrates not only the intrinsic connection of art to the earth but also the poet’s satisfaction, even satiation, with a time well spent: “My lea is deeply tilled.” The second sonnet ends at the point where the mechanisms of language meet the world the poet knows: “Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, / Each verse returning like the plough turned round.” Here Heaney’s philological interests combine with rural verities at the site of an archetypal definition of poetry.

As he produced the poems that constitute Station Island, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the chaos in the North continued, and Heaney’s poetic stature, especially in America, increased significantly. For a semester in 1979 Heaney succeeded Robert Lowell as director of Harvard’s poetry workshops for undergraduates. Then, in 1980, the year he published his first volume of selected poems, Harvard’s English Department offered him a job teaching one semester each year. Leaving Carysfort in 1981, Heaney began at Harvard in the spring of 1982. This appointment led to his being honored with the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1984, a position he held until spring 1996.

Also in late 1980 Heaney joined Deane, Hammond, and Tom Paulin to became a director of the Field Day Theatre Company. Founded in Deny earlier in 1980 by the playwright Friel and the actor Stephen Rea to promote theatrical and literary projects, the company explored, albeit from a nationalist perspective, the relationship of identity, politics, and culture in Ulster’s fractured civil society. Under Field Day’s auspices, Heaney published both Sweeney Astray and An Open Letter in 1983. Having grown up “in sight of some of Sweeney’s places and in earshot of others,” Heaney was familiar with the mythological bird-king’s domain; he also identified with Sweeney’s peripatetic flights across Ireland and even over the Irish Sea. Sweeney Astray was especially suitable for Field Day because the project retained some of the political intensity of 1972, the year it was begun. But for Heaney, as he wrote in the introduction, Sweeney also offered “a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance” and engaging in “the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligation.” In a similar vein of political engagement, Heaney wrote the Field Day pamphlet An Open Letter as a piquant corrective to his inclusion as a “British” poet in a recently published anthology edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. An Open Letter poetically affirms Heaneys overarching sense of his national Irish identity: “My passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen.”

Station Island also affirms Heaney’s personal connection to an Irish Catholic and nationalist community even as it demonstrates the catholicity of his artistic affiliations with other poets, living and dead. He dedicates poems to longtime friends and fellow poets Mahon, Muldoon, and Montague. “The Birthplace” records a pilgrimage to Thomas Hardys first home and admires Hardys ability to connect the actual world and the elsewhere of writing. Speaking as much of this vital exemplar as of himself, Heaney acknowledges “the unperturbed, reliable / ghost life... carried” within both poets. The first of three sections in the volume opens with “The Underground,” a poem that combines a couple’s hurry through the London Tube with Ovid’s accounts of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne and Orpheus’s failed rescue of Eurydice. “Sandstone Keepsake” makes further direct and politicized references to Dante’s Inferno, while “Chekhov on Sakhalin” re-creates the Dantesque scene of the writer Anton Chekhov as historical witness to the horrors of the Russian penal colony, where “He who thought to squeeze / His slave’s blood out and waken the free man / Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.”

Dante’s influence is most pronounced in “Station Island,” the title sequence that constitutes the second section of the volume. In this sequence the poet, participating in a Catholic pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, a small island in Lough Derg, County Donegal, meets the instructive and challenging ghosts of dead writers, family members, friends, and acquaintances. For instance, in the eighth poem, Heaney again encounters his murdered cousin McCartney; however, this time, the ghost refuses the poet’s naively consolatory ablutions. Instead, the murder victim indicts the poet for blithely eliding the brutality and terror suffered by Heaneys own relative: “You confused evasion with artistic tact.” As Heaney ultimately accuses himself of having “whitewashed ugliness,” he revises not only the earlier “The Strand at Lough Beg” but his sense of what poetry can and should do in the face of violence and death. Poetry, Heaney reminds himself, must continually remain “equidistant from self-justification and self-obliteration,” abdicating neither its role as witness to the “catastrophe of history” nor its ultimately “redemptive” possibility. The final poem of the sequence presents, in Dante’s terza rima, an equally stirring confrontation with James Joyce, who dismisses any fealty to narrow political positions and affirms instead the primacy of art for the artist:

You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elvergleams in the dark of the whole sea.

With the third section of the volume, “Sweeney Redivivus,” presenting Heaneys meditations on the figure and significance of Sweeney, this “book of changes” shows the poet consciously using encounters with history and literature to foster his own voice and lyric vision.

In 1988 Heaney published The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987, a book that established him as one of the major poet-critics of his generation. Though published almost as a companion volume to the poems of The Haw Lantern (1987), this second essay collection charts Heaneys evolution from a writer who uses poetry to address history to a poet whose use of historical circumstance is part of a larger sense of the integral relationship of art to the human condition. While all of these essays explore Heaneys understanding of his art, two essays may be read as “defenses of poetry” that explicitly articulate Heaneys own poetics. The first of these, “The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker,” doubles as the introduction to the volume and moves to square the artful and pleasurable properties of poetry with its role as historical witness. The title essay, originally presented in 1986 as the first of Heaneys T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Eliot College, University of Kent, moves from Eliot to Zbigniew Herbert to Elizabeth Bishop in its examination of these poets’ “fidelity . . . to the demands and promise of the artistic event” and their simultaneous “desire to witness exactly.”

Heaney inaugurated the Richard Ellmann Lectures at Emory University in April 1998 and published these three public lectures as The Place of Writing (1989). These essays confirm the movement of Heaneys thinking about poetry toward what Ron Schuchard, in an introduction, calls a “poetic transcendence” that “is not an evasion of sympathy with national conditions but rather a transposition of that sympathy into symbol.” Though Heaneys interest in symbol stretches back most notably to the bog bodies, this shift in emphasis accelerated especially with the 1987 publication of The Haw Lantern.

While Station Island portrays the middle-aged poet as a beneficiary of Dantesque literary and historical influences impelling him to “strike my own note,” The Haw Lantern, which won the Whitbread Award, seeks access to the ghostly, the imaginary, the strange in the actual. According to Helen Vendler, this book attempts to make the invisible visible, the imaginary real, and the strange ordinary. Above all, The Haw Lantern dwells upon absence. The volume is governed overwhelmingly by the deaths of Heaneys mother in October 1984 and his father in October 1986. Other influences include Heaneys engaged reading and personal contacts with Eastern European poets such as Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Miroslav Holub, and Joseph Brodsky. Heaneys dedicatory verse is instructive, for it demonstrates the shift in the poet’s gaze: “The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves. / Us, listening to a river in the trees.” The old sources of inspiration have their limits; new and more imaginative sources of poetic sustenance must be found.

One of the most important poems of The Haw Lantern is “Terminus,” which shows the poet understanding himself in terms of self-criticism and self-revision: “Is it any wonder when I thought / I would have second thoughts?” This poem, like the volume, projects Heaneys “capacity to be,” as he says in “Something to Write Home About” (1998, included in Finders Keepers), “attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and entrancements of what is beyond us–it is this double capacity that poetry both springs from and addresses.” Claiming the territory of the in-between, Heaney avows in a 1993 essay called “Frontiers of Writing” that “within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic,” where “each form of knowledge redresses the other and [affirms] that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.” Reversing his earlier aesthetic practice of using poetry to examine politics and history, he now uses social realities for the aesthetic purpose of describing a larger experience of containment and release, endurance and respite.

The deaths of Heaneys parents are more specifically registered in several elegies. In “The Stone Verdict,” a poem written just before the death of his mother, Heaney actually anticipates his father’s death and uses the cattleman’s “speechlessness” to define this imagined absence. At the center of The Haw Lantern lies the elegiac sonnet sequence “Clearances,” written in memory of Heaneys mother. This series of eight poems opens with a symbolic lesson in splitting coal blocks and calls on Heaneys mother to continue as a spirit of poetic instruction and inspiration: “Teach me now to listen, / To strike it rich behind the linear black.” The poems of “Clearances” memorialize the dead by bringing the poet and his mother into an exquisite communion, whether in the sanctuary of the tidy kitchen or by way of shared chores such as peeling potatoes or folding sheets.

In 1988 Heaney was elected to a five-year term as the Oxford University Professor of Poetry. This appointment, from 1989 to 1994, required Heaney to present three public lectures each year; collected and published in 1995 as The Redress of Poetry, these essays further consolidated Heaneys stature as a teacher of poetry. Yet, just as Heaneys critical prose from the late 1960s onward parallels in illustrative ways his poetry, various small and large translation projects simultaneously reflect his scholarly interests and feed his lyric poetry.

After Sweeney Astray, Heaney continued to further his interest in Irish-language poetry. While regularly translating works by Irish writers from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, he has also translated from Homer’s Greek, Virgil’s and Ovid’s Latin, Dante’s Italian, J. C. Bloem’s Dutch, Marin Sorescu’s Romanian, Leos Janacek’s Czech, and Jan Kochanowski’s Polish. Though his first attempts to translate the Buik Suibhne stalled in the early 1970s, this project lingered until Heaneys own poetic development yielded a fuller purchase on the original. This same pattern has held true for Beowulf, begun in 1985 but not published until 1999.

One substantial work that does not follow this pattern is the The Cure at Troy. Begun in early 1990 as a commission for Field Day, the work explores political ideas more prominently rendered in “The Government of the Tongue” than in The Haw Lantern or his next poetry volume, Seeing Things (1991). Nevertheless, late in the play, Neoptolemus upbraids Philoctetes by saying: “Stop licking your wounds. Start seeing things.” The play is about the physical and mental wounds of war and the Herculean efforts to transcend the given and heal both individuals and societies. Examining various strategies for achieving reconciliation, the play establishes poetry as the medium through which the inexorable symbiosis of the “murderous” and the “marvelous” (as he describes in Crediting Poetry) may be grasped.

Another translation opens Seeing Things, the loose first section of which consists of several lyrics referencing the death of Heaney’s father. As a prefatory lyric, “The Golden Bough,” a translation of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, suggests that the volume as a whole is a descent into the Underworld. This poem describes Aeneas’ encounter with the Cumaean Sibyl before whom the hero prays “for one look, one face-to-face meeting with my dear father.” Part 1 of the book then begins with another reference to the Underworld in “The Journey Back.” Here, the journey into hell apparently accomplished, nothing remains but the exit back into the known world of the quotidian, where poetry itself constitutes that sought-after alternate universe where the unimaginable might be revealed and a living son might reunite with his dead father.

Vendler suggests that “the airiness of Seeing Things occurs because Heaney is contemplating the physical through the scrim of extinction.” But these poems, despite their palpable sense of emptiness, frequently endeavor to comprehend this alternative, lyric reality: “He felt at one with space, // unroofed and obvious– / surprised in his empty arms / like some fabulous high-catcher / coming down with the ball.” Though “Fosterling” expresses the midlife epiphany in which Heaney admits to “waiting until I was nearly fifty / To credit marvels,” this poet’s visionary trust in an alternative understanding of an obviously violent world–a way of seeing and understanding the world through poetry-has been a crucial part of Heaney’s poetics since the late 1970s.

All of these developments are put into practice in the second section of Seeing Things, an extended sequence of twelve-line poems called “Squarings.” Heaney commented in a 2003 interview with Dennis O’Driscoll that he found the “shifting brilliancies” of the first of these poems to be “marvelous stuff... strange and unexpected,” and so he enthusiastically pursued the possibilities of his new form. He most frequently recites “Lightenings viii,” the eighth of his “Squarings,” a poem from the Annals of Clonmacnoise. With the monks at prayer, a visionary ship “appeared above them in the air,” and its deepset anchor snags on the altar rails. To free the ship, a sailor slides down the rope and struggles to release the anchor. The abbot then says: “This man can’t bear our life here and will drown . . . unless we help him.” And so they help; “the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back / Out of the marvelous as he had known it.”

In 1995 Heaney published ten of his fifteen Oxford lectures as The Redress of Poetry. In addition to pieces on various key poets, the essays “The Redress of Poetry” and “Frontiers of Writing” stand alongside “The Government of the Tongue” as defenses of poetry in the tradition of Philip Sidney, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. “The Redress of Poetry” once again attempts to ascertain the right relationship of art to history. This essay considers the responsibility of poetry to be “of present use” and to confront the world’s injustices. Heaney begins with Wallace Stevens’s idea of the “nobility” of poetry, recognized as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” This “activity of poetry” involves what he calls “redress,” a “tilt of the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium.” However, because redress involves a continuous recalibration of the right relationship between poetry and its world, Heaney is adamant about protecting the aesthetic aspect of poetry from overemphasis on its political nature. This statement is a crucial summation of Heaney’s views regarding the rights and responsibilities of not only his own work but poetry as an art form in the world.

Also in 1995 Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Critics of this prize frequently suspect that the Swedish Academy awards particular writers at particular times based on relevant contemporary political developments. It is also true that thirteen months before Heaney’s laureateship was announced, the Irish Republican Army declared a unilateral cease-fire, which created the first opportunity in many years for Northern Ireland to approach a political resolution of its sectarian violence. Though tempting, it has always been a mistake to associate too closely Heaney’s work–or the Swedish Academy’s decision–with Northern Ireland’s civil strife. Scholars, critics, journalists, and readers around the world greeted with enthusiasm the Swedish Academy’s judgment in the case of Heaney.

Although his life was full of public engagements before the Swedish Academy bestowed the Nobel, Heaney told Tom Adair in 1996 that despite counting other recent laureates including Brodsky, Milosz, and Derek Walcott as friends or mentors, he “was panicked by the intensity” of the global fame and the new pressures not just on his public life but on his writing life. However, in the years after what he calls “the Stockholm intervention,” Heaney has continued his peregrinations around the globe while maintaining a steady

production of poems, articles, and essays. One respite occurred in July 1997, when Harvard appointed Heaney the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard. This position, which he still holds, allowed him to maintain his affiliation with the university while reducing substantially the teaching responsibilities that had been associated with the Boylston Chair, which he then relinquished in 1998.

His first book after the Nobel Prize, The Spirit Level (1996), winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, departs from the visionary and spectral Seeing Things. Heaney says that he associates The Spirit Level “with dungarees, the long pocket, the solidity of work, and of being eye to eye with your democratic life.” But, like his preceding books, The Spirit Level responds to the deaths of his parents and confronts historical atrocity as it taps visionary resources contained in the most quotidian of things. This volume begins with an invocatory poem, “The Rain Stick,” which captures the unstable simplicity of a cactus stalk filled with grit or dry seeds. When revolved, this object becomes not only a musical instrument but a simulacrum for the climate of Ireland. The poem declares: “Upend the rain stick and what happens next / Is a music that you never would have known / To listen for.” The poem then acknowledges central truths about poetry:

Upend the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once, 
Twice, ten, a thousand times before. 
Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

The Spirit Level aspires to create bridges to the domain of the marvelous, especially in other poems about vocation, such as “Whitby-sur-Moyola,” “The Thimble,” or “Mint.” But the political situation in the North once again receives attention in poems such as “Keeping Going,” “Two Lorries,” and “The Flight Path.” The latter recalls a May 1979 encounter with a hard-core Republican on the train to Belfast. It captures the dilemma Heaney as a public figure has faced for years: this man “enters and sits down / Opposite and goes for me head on. / ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write / Something for us?’” Answering all the critics, the poet says: “If I do write something, / Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.”

On 9 February 1996 the IRA withdrew from its cease-fire just before a massive car bomb exploded in the Canary Wharf district of London. Though sectarian bombings and murders continued through 19 July 1997, when the IRA restored its 1994 cease-fire, Heaney reflected a widespread if guarded optimism when he said in 1996 that “I am hopeful we’ve moved away from the atrocious into the messy.” Indeed, the 1997 renewal of the IRA’s cease-fire allowed all-party talks to continue after Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing, rejoined negotiations. These deliberations finally yielded the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement on 10 April 1998. A province-wide referendum on 22 May 1998 overwhelmingly approved the complicated power-sharing deal. In autumn 1998 John Hume and David Trimble, representatives for the majority Catholic and Protestant political parties, respectively, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Against this backdrop, Heaney finished his translation of Beowulf and prepared the poems in Electric Light (2001). Commissioned by the American publishing house W. W. Norton, the translation, which also won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, quickly became a best-seller in both Britain and the United States, with hundreds of thousands of copies sold.

Heaney’s conscious effort to occasionally use distinctly Hiberno-English words reflects both the originality of Heaney’s work and the fact that the translation was being produced against the backdrop of nearly twenty years of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. A prime example of this translation strategy is Heaney’s description of Hrothgar’s Hall using the Elizabethan English word “bawn.” Like the overall translation project, this word, which stems from the Irish word bódhün, meaning a fortified shelter for cattle, points to the “complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism” that defines the relationship between Ireland and England, as Heaney states in the introduction. While initially attracted by the “sounds and shapes of the lines,” Heaney admitted in a 2000 interview with Karl Miller to remaining confident of “the adequacy of the poetry [in Beowulf] to the present time.”

With the violence of history understood as a continuous “horizon of dread,” Heaney’s Beowulf puts special emphasis on the various funerary passages and laments comprising “moments of lyric intensity” that unite metrical and sensory elements with a more visionary scope. As he explains in the introduction, it was a single word–the Old English polian, meaning “to suffer”–that accessed his “right-of-way” into the text. This Old English word, Heaney realized, “was not strange at all, for it was the word that older and less educated people would have used in the country where I grew up.” Heard in the Hiberno-English speech of Heaney’s family, polian became an “enabling note,” justifying the project and prompting a particular, familiar tone of voice. A triumph of Heaney’s career-long endeavor to bridge the most local with the universal, Heaney’s Beowulf perhaps most poignantly communicates to the present world with the anonymous Geat woman’s lament before Beowulf’s funeral pyre. In the introduction, Heaney writes:

The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being exposed to a comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves the better for having them expressed with such adequacy and dignity and unforgiving truth.

In the wake of Beowulf, Heaney published Electric Light, an intense, burnished volume of poems. Electric Light confirms the ability of poetry to bridge past and present, self and other, and shows how such seeming opposites symbiotically coexist. The first section of the volume is dominated by Virgilian eclogues and other pastoral lyrics deriving power from the “earthed lightning” of natural beauty found in such places as Greece, Spain, or Ireland. The second section–elegies for poets, friends, and family members–mourns these dead, yet listens for what remains despite death’s obdurate silence. Heaneys elegy for Hughes likens his friend’s poetry to “a single span... Over the railway lines at Anahorish.” Standing under the “cranial acoustic of the stone” bridge, Heaney memorializes Hughes’s life and poetry by demonstrating its lasting and confirming effect on his own verse.

In “Known World,” Heaney confronts the hardly unfamiliar internecine violence in the former Yugoslavia, where the displacements and massacres of Bosnian Muslims and Serbs prompt more questions than answers. Murders in Ireland–that of Michael Collins in 1922 and Sean Brown in 1997–intrude into the “The Loose Box” and “The Augean Stables,” respectively. Like “At Toomebridge,” which also memorializes a political killing from 1798, these poems are attentive to but not preoccupied with historical reference.

After the terrorist attacks in America on 11 September 2001, Heaney turned to Horace and Beowulf to address this question of what remains after catastrophe while putting terrible spectacle into perspective. Heaney says that his poem “Horace and the Thunder,” first published in The Irish Times on 17 November 2001, describes “poetry’s covenant with the irrational... thunder in the clear, blue sky.” The poem begins by declaring: “Anything can happen.” It repeats: “Anything can happen, the tallest things // Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded.” The poem is akin to Yeats’s apocalyptic “The Second Coming” in its timeless vision of human vulnerability, as “stropped-beaked Fortune / Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest / Off one, setting it down bleeding on the next.” Going beyond 11 September, the poem, Heaney says, “expresses the sudden casual desolations of the opening years of our new millennium.” It attests to the ability of poetry to decry, yet understand, that atrocity of all types is an inexorable part of human history. “Horace and the Thunder” and Heaneys other “September 11” poem, “The Helmet” (included in District & Circle, 2006), offer no panacea beyond the trust that something (like a voice) will survive.

In 2004 Heaney retitled “Horace and the Thunder” as “Anything Can Happen” and republished it in a small book to support the work of Amnesty International. Anything Can Happen includes Heaneys poem and translations of the poem into twenty-three “languages of conflict,” displayed on facing pages. The languages include English and Irish, Xhosa and Afrikaans, Hebrew and Arabic, Serbian and Bosnian, Chinese and Tibetan, Spanish and Basque, Hindu and Urdu, and Turkish and Greek.

After several years of discussions with various universities in the United States, Heaney announced on 23 September 2003 that Emory University had acquired a substantial collection of his personal and literary papers dating from 1964 to the present and including thousands of letters and other printed materials, as well as photographs and recordings. The collection does not include manuscripts of his poems, translations, or prose works. In 2002 Heaney published Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001, which won the Truman Capote Award for literary criticism. This volume brings together key essays from Heaneys four previously published books of criticism in addition to many other uncollected essays and reviews. The volume, like Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996 (1998) and the placement of his papers, represents a stocktaking as he enters the fifth decade of his writing life.

A related stocktaking occurs in The Burial at Thebes, Heaneys translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, commissioned to honor the centenary of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. In a review for the lrish Times (4 April 2004) Thomas Kilroy emphasized that The Burial at Thebes “is a companion piece” to Heaneys other Sophocles translation, The Cure at Troy. Kilroy pointed out the importance, in both plays, of Heaneys title changes that focus on “the healing, restorative product of tragedy rather than the dark journey itself.”

Heaneys translation, laced with the prosaic verbiage of contemporary American and British politicians, addresses the international conflicts of the new millennium. In “A Story that Sings Down the Centuries” (2004) Heaney wrote that he found his own “poetic go-ahead” in his recollection of the note of grief in the eighteenth-century Irish-language poem known as “The Lament for Art O’Leary,” by Eibhlin Dhubh Ní Chonaill. The “three-beat line” of Ní Chonaill’s voice in mourning satisfied Heaney’s sense of Antigone’s first “speedy, haunted” utterances. Heaney said he found it “easy enough to play variations” on this metrical foundation, “making the chorus, for example, speak a version of the four-beat, alliterating, Old English line.” The Anglo-Saxon connection is not only metrical but thematic: from “The Lament for Art O’Leary,” it is an easy jump to the Geat woman’s lament in Beowulf and then to Antigone’s outcries against Creon’s injustice. Another impetus for this play is rooted in the 2003 American and British invasion of Iraq. Heaney says that “Creon puts it to the chorus in these terms: either you are a patriot, a loyal citizen and regard Antigone as an enemy of the state because she does honour to her traitor brother, or else you yourselves are traitorous because you stand up for a woman who has broken the law and defied my authority.” In a review of the Abbey Theatre production for Dublin (6 April 2004) Harvey O’Brien commented: “Though Heaney makes claims for a contemporary context to this production through reference to George W. Bush’s division of the world based on unconditional loyalty to his foreign policy, such a reading is not necessarily invited or exclusive.” O’Brien also noted that “Heaney has been careful not to be too rigorous with domestic applicability even given the presentation of the production as part of the Abbey Centenary,” but he added, “This is not to say that there is any ‘fuzziness’ in Heaney’s script... the richness and power of this classic piece of theatre have been respected while the needs and the ear of a contemporary audience have also been addressed.”

Seamus Heaney once said in an essay on Yeats, another Irish poet who spoke from the Nobel Laureate’s podium in Stockholm, “The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them . . . it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place.” Heaney’s statement holds true for his own work as well.

Interviews

Seamus Deane, “Unhappy and at Home,” Crane Bag, 1, no. 1 (1977): 61–67;

Robert Druce, “A Raindrop on a Thorn,” Dutch Quarterly Review, 9, no. 1 (1978): 24–37;

James Randall, “An Interview with Seamus Heaney,” Ploughshares, 5, no. 3 (1979): 7–22;

Deane, “Talk with Seamus Heaney,” New York Times, 2 December 1979, p. 47;

John Haffenden, “Meeting Seamus Heaney: An Interview,” in his Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981; Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 57–75;

Frank Kinahan, “An Interview with Seamus Heaney,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (Spring 1982): 405–414;

June Beisch, “An Interview with Seamus Heaney,” Literary Review, 29 (Winter 1986): 31–42;

Rand Brandes, “Seamus Heaney: An Interview,” Salmagundi, 80 (Fall 1988): 4–21;

Tom Adair, “Calling the Tune,” Linen Hall Review, 6 (Fall 1989): 5–8;

Henri Cole, “The Art of Poetry, LXXV,” Paris Review, 144 (Fall 1997): 88–138;

George Morgan, “Interview with Seamus Heaney,” Cycnos, 15, no. 2 (1998): 227–235;

Luigi Amara, David Huerta, and Julio Trujillo, “Conversación con Seamus Heaney: La conciencia poética,” Letras Libres, 1 (April 1999): 36–40;

Heaney and Robert Hass, Sounding Lines: The Art of Translating Poetry (Berkeley, Cal.: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2000);

Karl Miller, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000);

Mike Murphy, “Seamus Heaney,” in Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy, edited by Cliodhna Ni Anluain (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), pp. 81–97;

John Brown, “Seamus Heaney,” in his In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (Cliffs of Moher, Ireland: Salmon, 2002);

Dennis O’Driscoll, “The Lannan Foundation: Readings and Conversations: Seamus Heaney with Dennis O’Driscoll,” 1 October 2003 <http://www.lannan.org/docs/semus-heaney-031001-trans-conv.pdf>.

Bibliographies

Michael J. Durkan and Rand Brandes, Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996; London: Prentice Hall International, 1996);

Jonathan Allison, “Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide,” ANQ, 13, no. 1 (2000): 44–46.

References

Tom Adair, “Caught Inside a Raindrop,” Scotsman, 28 April 1996, p. 13;

Agenda, special Heaney issue, edited by William Cookson and Peter Dale, 27 (Spring 1989);

Michael Allen, ed., Seamus Heaney (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997);

Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988);

Andrews, ed., Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1992);

Calvin Bedient, “The Music of What Happens,” Parnassus, 8 (Fall/Winter 1979): 109–122;

Harold Bloom, ed., Seamus Heaney (New York: Chelsea House, 1986);

Rand Brandes, “The Dismembering Muse: Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Kenneth Burke’s ‘Four Master Tropes,’” Bucknell Review, 38, no. 1 (1994): 177–194;

Edward Broadbridge, ed., Seamus Heaney (Copenhagen: Danmarks Radio, 1977);

Terence Brown, “Four New Voices: Poets of the Present,” in Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975), pp. 171–213;

Sidney Burris, The Poetry of Resistance: Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990);

Robert Buttel, Seamus Heaney (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1975);

Colby Quarterly, special Heaney issue, 30 (March 1994);

Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998);

Patricia Coughlan, ‘“Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney,” in Gender in Irish Writing, edited by Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991);

Tony Curtis, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney, third edition (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Poetry Wales Press, 1994);

Seamus Deane, “Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold,” in his Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London: Faber & Faber, 1985);

Desmond Fennell, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” Stand, 32 (Fall 1991): 38–65;

Field Day Theatre Company, Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985);

John Wilson Foster, The Achievement of Seamus Heaney (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995);

Thomas C. Foster, Seamus Heaney (Boston: Twayne, 1989);

Adrian Frazier, “Anger and Nostalgia: Seamus Heaney and the Ghost of the Father,” Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies, 36 (Fall- Winter 2001): 7–38;

Robert F. Garratt, ed., Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney (New York: G. K. Hall / London: Prentice Hall International, 1995);

Henry Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992);

Jonathan Hufstader, Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999);

Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (London: Macmillan, 1988);

John Kerrigan, “Earth Writing: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson,” Essays in Criticism, 48 (April 1998): 144–168;

Benedict Kiely, “A Raid into Dark Corners: The Poems of Seamus Heaney,” Hollins Critic, 7 (October 1970): 1–12;

David Lloyd, ‘“Pap for the Dispossessed’: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity,” Boundary, 2 (Winter–Spring 1985): 319–342;

Edna Longley, “Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland,” in her Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986);

Longley, “Stars and Horses, Pigs and Trees,” Crane Bag, 3, no. 2 (1979);

Michael Longley, “Poetry,” in Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, edited by Longley (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), pp. 95–109;

Catharine Malloy and Phyllis Carey, eds., Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press / London: Associated University Presses, 1996);

Arthur E. McGuinness, “The Craft of Diction: Revision in Seamus Heaney’s Poems,” in Image and Illusion: Anglo-Irish literature and its Contexts, edited by Maurice Harmon (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1979), pp. 62–91;

McGuinness, Seamus Heaney: Poet and Critic (New York: Peter Lang, 1994);

Michael R. Molino, Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994);

Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (New York & London: Methuen, 1982);

Sean O’Brien, “Seamus Heaney: The Space Made by Poetry,” in his The Deregulated Muse (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), pp. 89–96;

Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (New York & London: Harvester Wheat–sheaf, 1994);

Jay Parini, “Seamus Heaney: The Ground Possessed,” Southern Review, 16 (Winter 1979): 100–123;

Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993);

Marjorie Perloff, “Seamus Heaney: Peat, Politics and Poetry,” Washington Post Book World, 25 January 1981:5,11;

Peter Sacks, “Unleashing the Lyric: Seamus Heaney,” Antioch Review, 48 (Summer 1990): 381–389;

Salmagundi, special Heaney issue, 80 (Fall 1988);

Robert Tracy, “Into an Irish Free State: Heaney, Sweeney and Clearing Away,” in Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, edited by Michael Kenneally (Gerrards Cross, U.K.: Colin Smythe, 1995), pp. 238–262;

Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995);

Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998);

Stephen Wade, More on the Word-Hoard: The Work of Seamus Heaney (Nottingham, U.K.: Paupers’ Press, 1993).