The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney

  t h e c a m b r i d g e c o m p a n i o n t o s e a m u s h e a n e y

  

Seamus Heaney is a unique phenomenon in contemporary literature, as a poet

Beowulf translation, and volumes of poems such as whose works (such as his

Electric Light and District and Circle) have been high in the best-seller lists for

decades. Especially since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, he has come to

be considered one of the most important English-language poets in the world.

  

This Companion gives an up-to-date overview of his career thus far, and of

his reception in Ireland, England and around the world. Its distinguished con-

tributors offer detailed readings of all his major publications, in poetry, prose

and translation. The essays further explore the central themes of his poetry, his

relations with other writers and his prose writing. Designed for students, this

volume will also have much to interest and inform the general reader and admirer

of Heaney’s unique poetic voice.

  

A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.

  

T H E C A M B R I D G E

C O M P A N I O N T O

SEAMUS HEANEY

E D I T E D B Y

BERNARD O’DONOGHUE

  

c a m b r i d g e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

  

The Cambridge companion to Seamus Heaney / edited by Bernard O’Donoghue.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978 -0-521-83882-5

1 . Heaney, Seamus, 1939– – Criticism and interpretation.

  

pr6058 .e2z5745 2008

821 .914–dc22

2008040775

isbn 978 -0-521-83882-5 hardback

isbn 978

• 0-521-54755-0 paperback

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Notes on Contributors page vii Acknowledgements x

Note on the Text, and Abbreviations xi

  Chronology xiii

  1 Introduction b e r n a r d o ’ d o n o g h u e

  1

  2 Seamus Heaney’s Working Titles: From ‘Advancements of Learning’ to ‘Midnight Anvil’ r a n d b r a n d e s

  19

  3 The Context of Heaney’s Reception p a t r i c k c r o t t y

  37

  4 Heaney in Public d e n n i s o ’ d r i s c o l l

  56

  5 Heaney and the Feminine f r a n b r e a r t o n

  73

  6 Heaney and Eastern Europe j u s t i n q u i n n

  92

  7 Heaney’s Classics and the Bucolic b e r n a r d o ’ d o n o g h u e 106

  8 Professing Poetry: Heaney as Critic d a v i d w h e a t l e y 122

  

c o n t e n t s

  9 Heaney and the Irish Poetic Tradition a n d r e w m u r p h y 136

  10 Irish Influence and Confluence in Heaney’s Poetry d i l l o n j o h n s t o n 150

  11 Heaney and Yeats n e i l c o r c o r a n 165

  12 Heaney’s Wordsworth and the Poetics of Displacement g u i n n b a t t e n 178

  13 Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North h e a t h e r o ’ d o n o g h u e 192

  14 Crediting Marvels: Heaney after 50 j o h n w i l s o n f o s t e r 206 Guide to Further Reading

  224 Index 229

  

CONT RIB UTORS

g u i n n b a t t e n is an associate professor of English at Washington University

in St Louis. She is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and

Commodity Culture in English Romanticism and several published essays on contem-

porary Irish poetry. A former editor for the Wake Forest University Press’s Irish poetry

series, and the co-author of ‘Irish Poetry in English, 1945–2000’ for The Cambridge

History of Irish Literature, she is writing a book on ethics and the crisis of autobio-

graphy in English Romanticism as they are revised in contemporary Irish poetry.

r a n d b r a n d e s was born in Batesville, Indiana and educated at Hanover College

(BA) and Emory University (MA and PhD). He is the recipient of two Fulbright

  

Fellowships to work with Seamus Heaney in Dublin. Along with Michael J. Durkan

Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide (1996) and (1925–96), he has published

Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography 1959–2003 (2008). He is the Martin Luther

Stevens Professor of English at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina.

f r a n b r e a r t o n is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast, and assistant

director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. She is author of The Great War in

Irish Poetry (2000) and Reading Michael Longley (2006), and is currently working

on a study of Robert Graves and twentieth-century poetry.

n e i l c o r c o r a n is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University

of Liverpool. He previously taught at the universities of Sheffield, Swansea and

  

St Andrews. A revised, enlarged edition of his book on Seamus Heaney was

published as The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1998), and recent

publications include Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (2004) and The

Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2007).

p a t r i c k c r o t t y was born in Fermoy, Co. Cork, in 1952 and educated at

University College Cork and the University of Stirling. He is the editor of Modern

  

Irish Poetry: An Anthology (1995) and of the forthcoming New Penguin Book of

Irish Verse. He is Professor of Irish and Scottish Literature at the University of

Aberdeen.

  

n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s

j o h n w i l s o n f o s t e r was born in Belfast and educated at the Queen’s University

and the University of Oregon. Among his books are Fictions of the Irish Literary

  

Revival (1987), Colonial Consequences (1991), The Achievement of Seamus

Heaney (1995) and Irish Novels 1890–1940 (2008). He is Professor Emeritus,

University of British Columbia, and in 2004–5 was a Leverhulme Visiting

Professor to the United Kingdom.

d i l l o n j o h n s t o n Irish Poetry after Joyce (1985

has published two editions of

  The Poetic Economies of England and Ireland (2001), as well as and 1977), and

many essays, mostly about Irish and British poetry. He was founder and director of

Wake Forest University Press. He currently lectures in the graduate program at

Washington University in St Louis.

a n d r e w m u r p h y is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. He

contributed the Seamus Heaney volume (1996) to the British Council’s ‘Writers

and their Work’ series. His other books include But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us:

Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (1999) and Shakespeare for the

People: Working Class Readers 1800–1900 (2000).

b e r n a r d o ’ d o n o g h u e is a Fellow in Medieval English at Wadham College,

Oxford. His study Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry was published in

  

1994 . He has published five volumes of poems, and his Selected Poems was

published in 2008.

h e a t h e r o ’ d o n o g h u e was born in Stockton-upon-Tees, Co. Durham, and grew

up in Middlesbrough. She was educated at Westfield College, University of London,

and Somerville College, Oxford. She is currently Vigfusson-Rausing Reader in Old

Icelandic at the University of Oxford, and Vice-Principal of Linacre College. She is

  The Genesis of a Saga Narrative (1991), Skaldic Verse and the Poetics the author of

of Saga Narrative: An Introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (2004) and

From Asgard to Valhalla (2007), a study of the reception history of most recently,

Old Norse myth. Her present project is a book about the influence of Old Norse

myth on poetry in English.

d e n n i s o ’ d r i s c o l l has worked as a civil servant since the age of sixteen. His

eight books of poetry include New and Selected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book

  

Society Special Commendation, and Reality Check (2007–8). A selection of his

essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, was published in 2001.

He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and its

American counterpart, Quote Poet Unquote (2008).

j u s t i n q u i n n was born in Dublin in 1968, and educated at Trinity College. He is

the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Waves & Trees (2006), and he

has written two studies of twentieth-century American poetry. His books include

  

n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s

the Cambridge Introduction to Modern Poetry, 1800–2000 (2008); translations of

the contemporary Czech poet, Petr Borkovec, From the Interior (2008); and, as

editor, Irish Poetry after Feminism (2008). He is Associate Professor of English and

American Literature at the Charles University, Prague.

d a v i d w h e a t l e y was born in Dublin and lectures at the University of Hull. He has

published three collections of poetry, and edited the poetry journal Metre with

  Contemporary British Poetry: An Introduction is forthcoming Justin Quinn. His from Cambridge University Press.

  

ACKN O WL EDG EME NT S

  My primary thanks are to Seamus Heaney, for providing the incomparable subject-matter and for his hallmark generosity and goodwill towards the project. I am deeply grateful to all the contributors who have borne delay with patience. I have drawn on Dennis O’Driscoll’s noted infallibility more than once. Ray Ryan, Maartje Scheltens and Christopher Hills of Cambridge University Press were also very generous with their expertise. Lindeth Vasey was an extraordinarily efficient and reassuring reader and copy-editor. Wadham College and the Oxford English Faculty kindly allowed me a period of leave to work on the project, and I was given a generous grant by the English Faculty for research support. I am greatly in the debt of Drs Tara Stubbs and Heather O’Donoghue for addressing my word-processing incom- petence. Without them the book would have never reached its quietus. Most of Heaney’s works have been published both in Britain and Ireland, and in America. When there is any divergence, I have given the British Isles English titles and dates of publication as the editions most readily available. In the ‘

  Further Reading’ I have given the English or Irish place of publication first because, when there is any difference in publication dates, those are always earlier.

  Abbreviations Titles of books frequently referred to, especially individual volumes of poetry and the four collected volumes of prose essays.

  B Beowulf CP Crediting Poetry DC District and Circle DD Door into the Dark EL Electric Light FK Finders Keepers FW Field Work GT The Government of the Tongue HL The Haw Lantern N North OG Opened Ground OL An Open Letter

  P Preoccupations RP The Redress of Poetry SA Sweeney Astray SI Station Island SL The Spirit Level ST Seeing Things WO Wintering Out

  n o t e o n t h e t e x t , a n d a b b r e v i a t i o n s

  

CHRONOLOGY

  ( Italics denote political events)

  13 April 1939 Born on a farm, ‘Mossbawn’, in Tamniarn, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland, to Patrick and Margaret Heaney. Eldest of nine children – two girls and seven boys.

  Attends the local Anahorish school, a mixed primary 1945–51 school with Catholic and Protestant pupils. Played

  Gaelic Football for St Malachy’s, Castledawson up to minor level, at age 18. 1951–57 Attends, as a boarder, St Columb’s College, Derry City. 1953 Family moves from Mossbawn farm to ‘The Wood’, at the other end of the parish, following the death of his brother

  Christopher (an incident commemorated in both his early poem ‘Mid-Term Break’ and the late poem ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ in District and Circle). 1957–61 At Queen’s University Belfast, doing a degree in English.

  Graduates with First Class. First poems published in Queen’s literary magazines. 1961–2 Studies for a postgraduate teachers’ training diploma at St Joseph’s college of education, Andersonstown, Belfast.

  While at St Joseph’s, writes an extended essay on literary magazines in the North of Ireland, and is led to the collec- tions of the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, and the works of the Ulster poet John Hewitt, and the British poet Ted Hughes. 1962 Begins teaching at St Thomas’s Intermediate School,

  Ballymurphy. The headmaster, the short-story writer Michael McLaverty, introduces Heaney to the poetry of

  

c h r o n o l o g y

  Patrick Kavanagh. Registers for a part-time postgraduate degree at Queen’s.

  Begins writing in earnest. In November 1962, ‘

  Tractors’ is published in the Belfast Telegraph; other

  Irish journals, including the Queen’s University maga- zine,

Interest, soon publish other poems

  ‘ Spring 1963 Mid-Term Break’ is published by Kilkenny Magazine. Autumn 1963 Leaves school teaching and returns to St Joseph’s as a lecturer in English. Meets poet and lecturer Philip Hobsbaum at

  Queen’s, and becomes part of the ‘Belfast Group’. The group would meet in Hobsbaum’s flat until his move to Glasgow in 1966; 1966–1970 they would meet at Heaney’s flat. Its members included at various points Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker and James Simmons, and later Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby.

  1965 Mary Holland publicises the Belfast Group in the Observer in London, as part of the Belfast Festival. August 1965 Marries Marie Devlin, whom he had first met in October 1962 .

  November 1965 The Belfast Festival publishes Heaney’s first slim collection, Eleven Poems.

  1966 Awarded a lectureship at Queen’s following Hobsbaum’s departure. Begins to write topical articles for the New

  Statesman and the Listener and to make broadcasts for BBC radio and television. Becomes known for his cultural and political communications.

  The Manchester publisher Phoenix Pamphlet Poets publishes A Lough Neagh Sequence.

  May 1966 Faber publishes first full-length poetry collection,

Death of a Naturalist. Receives the Gregory Award for Young

  Writers and the Geoffrey Faber Prize, setting the pattern of prizewinning which was maintained by all his poetry volumes. July 1966 Son, Michael, is born. Writes about Belfast in the ‘Out of

  London’ column in the New Statesman, focusing on poli- tical rather than cultural issues.

  

c h r o n o l o g y

  February 1968 Second son, Christopher, is born.

  Civil rights march in Derry City – first major violent clash of the ‘Troubles’.

  5 October 1968

  24 October 1968 Writes a piece in the Listener, ‘Old Derry’s Walls’, in sympathy with the marchers, and a satirical song,

  ‘ Craig’s Dragoons’, for Radio Eireann. June 1969 Second volume, Door into the Dark, is published. Wins the Somerset Maugham Award.

  12 August 1969 Sectarian clashes in Derry; would become known as the ‘Battle of the Bogside’.

  14 August 1969 The British Army enters Derry.

  January 1970 The Provisional Irish Republican Army is officially formed in Dublin. 1970–1 Spends the academic year at the University of California, Berkeley. Returns to Northern Ireland in September 1971.

  1971 The Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign is stepped up.

  1972 Publication of Soundings.

  30 January 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’, in which thirteen civilians are killed by

  the British Army in Derry. Would write a lament for the dead, ‘The Road to Derry’, and would commemorate the event in ‘Casualty’, published in Field Work. August 1972 Having resigned from Queen’s, the Heaneys rent from

  Anne Saddlemyer a cottage in Glanmore, Co. Wicklow, where Heaney begins work as a freelance writer (rejoicing in the local association with J. M. Synge). November 1972 Publication of Wintering Out. 1973–7 Hosts, intermittently, a radio show,

Imprint, on Radio Eireann

  April 1973 Daughter, Catherine Ann, is born. October 1973 Visits Denmark, where he sees the bodies of the Bog people at the museum at Silkeborg.

  

c h r o n o l o g y

  The Belfast/Honest Ulsterman Press publishes prose- 1975 poetic sequence

  Stations, completed in May and June 1974 , as a pamphlet. The publication reflects a vital moment in his career when he acknowledges the impact of sectarianism on his poetry.

  Ted Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, publishes a limited edition of the whole series of bog poems – as Bog Poems – from her Rainbow Press.

  June 1975 Publication of North. October 1975 Joins the English department at Carysfort, a teachers’ training college in Dublin.

  November 1976 The Heaneys move to Sandymount, Dublin. 1976–81 Employed as Head of the English Department at Carysfort.

  1979 Spends a semester teaching a poetry workshop at Harvard University as one of several temporary successors to the American poet Robert Lowell, who had died in 1977.

  Publication of Field Work, thought to have been influ- enced by the poetry of Lowell (Heaney had given an address at his memorial service in London). Lowell had praised

  North, while an elegy to him is included in Field Work. 1980 Joins the Board of the Field Day Company, founded by his close friend, the playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen

  Rea to produce Friel’s Translations outside the commercial

  Paulin and Seamus Deane. Publication of Selected Poems,

  1965

• –1975, and Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968– 1978 (in October).

  

1980 –1 Ten Republican prisoners die on hunger strike, including

Heaney’s neighbour Francis Hughes, from Bellaghy.

  January 1982 Begins five-year contract at Harvard, teaching one semes- ter a year. 1983 As a director of Field Day, Heaney publishes, in Ireland,

  Sweeney Astray (started in 1973), a version of the long

  

c h r o n o l o g y

  medieval Irish poem, Buile Suibhne (‘the madness of

  Sweeney’). Publishes a pamphlet poem, An Open Letter, dissociating himself from the adjective ‘British’ (Blake

  Morrison and Andrew Motion had included him in their 1982 edition of the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry).

  1984 Elected to the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory, Harvard University, which he holds until 1996. Heaney divides his time between Dublin and America, running poetry workshops at Harvard for four months of the year.

  October 1984 Publication of Station Island and of Sweeney Astray in

  England. Death of his mother, commemorated in ‘ Clearances’.

  1984 Publication of Hailstones. 1986 Death of his father, commemorated in ‘The Stone Verdict’.

  1987 Publication of The Haw Lantern, which wins the Whitbread Award.

  1988 Publication of The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings.

  1989 Publication of The Place of Writing. 1989–94 Takes up five-year appointment as Professor of Poetry at

  Oxford; lectures published as The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures in 1995.

  Publication of 1990

  New Selected Poems 1966–1987, and of The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’s ‘Philoctetes’; performed by Field Day Company in Derry.

  1991 Publication of Seeing Things. 1994 Co-edits

  The Rattle Bag, a poetry anthology for older children, with Ted Hughes.

  1995 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Publishes Crediting Poetry.

  

c h r o n o l o g y

  Publication of 1996 The Spirit Level. Commonwealth Literature Award. Named Whitbread Book of the Year.

  1998

  Good Friday Agreement reached on 10 April between the British and Irish governments and most Northern Irish political groups, restoring devolved government to Northern Ireland; seen as making an official end to the ‘Troubles’. Omagh Bombing: the exploding of a Real IRA bomb in Omagh, Co. Tyrone on 15 August, in which 29 people were killed.

  1999 Publication of the translation of Beowulf, which also is named as Whitbread Book of the Year.

  2001 Publication of Electric Light. 2002 Publication of

  Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971– 2001 . 2003 Opening of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast.

  Publication of 2004 The Burial at Thebes, a translation of Sophocles’

  Antigone, to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. 2006 Publication of District and Circle which wins the T. S.

  Eliot Prize.

  

Introduction

  When Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the citation famously paid tribute to his combination of ‘lyrical beauty and ethical depth which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’. This captures with remarkable economy not only Heaney’s pre-eminent strengths, but also the two imperatives between which his own commentary and the criticism of him have fluctuated. In the Preface to

  Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–

  

2001 Heaney described the choice between the ethical and the aesthetic again,

  quoting from his Foreword to the prose collection Preoccupations in 1980:

  ‘ How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’ By quoting the earlier Foreword verbatim, Heaney was making it clear that his abiding concerns have remained unchanged.

  The Nobel citation also summarises the issues that this book aims to account for. Heaney’s most recent collection of poems District and Circle (2006) – and Heaney’s titles are carefully considered, as Rand Brandes’s essay here shows – marks a point, forty years on from his first full-length volume Death of a Naturalist, at which he circles back to the local district in which that highly localised volume was placed. In those forty years Heaney has published at least twelve major individual volumes of poems, three series of Selected Poems, several dramatic translations and a large body of critical prose. Not surprisingly, taking stock is not a simple matter: by now, in 2008, there is a very considerable bibliography on him to account for, as well as his own works, and several critical approaches of varying schools of thought and degrees of approval.

  A comparison with Yeats is revealing (indeed it has been found hard to avoid): Heaney is now the age Yeats was in 1934, twelve years after he had won the Nobel Prize (it is thirteen years since Heaney’s) and a year after the publication of

  The Winding Stair. At the corresponding stage Yeats too was a major international figure, and he still had a significant body of poetic work ahead of him. Yet there was no study of Yeats in existence, though a number

  

The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney

  of important shorter discussions had appeared, such as in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle. By now the number of specialising books on Heaney is too large to itemise because it is likely to be out of date as soon as it is published. For example there are at least sixteen books whose title is simply Seamus Heaney, as well as many others with titles in which the poet’s name occurs. If it is suspected that this is merely a change in the times, and that there are simply more books published, this quickly proves not to be the explanation. No other current poet is nearly as much written about as Heaney has been, since the appearance of the first book devoted to him, Blake Morrison’s in 1982, the same year in which the introduction to Morrison and Andrew Motion’s

Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry saw the emergence of Heaney as one of the factors that made a new anthology timely

  In this introduction I will principally be tracing the poet’s own poetic writings and his reception, in keeping with the emphasis of the book. In this connection another Yeats comparison might be made: Heaney has been a busy career-teacher of literature as well as writer, rather than ‘a man of letters’ in the way that Yeats was (the term is no longer current, nor is the lifestyle). While a large body of critical prose work survives from the 1880s at the very beginning of Yeats’s writing life, nothing of comparable substance exists in Heaney’s case, despite the fact that he is recognised as a major critic- practitioner nowadays (his distinctive gifts as a critic are established by David Wheatley in his chapter here; John Wilson Foster paid lavish tribute to those gifts too, calling Heaney’s ‘the best Irish literary criticism since ₁ Yeats’ ). But, while Heaney was a regular reviewer, especially for the

  Listener from 1966 onwards, it was the late 1970s before any more extensive critical writings appeared, culminating in the publication of ₂ Preoccupations in 1980. And 1977 has significance as the year when he first published critical work of some length and when he first gave one of the many inter- views which emerged over the years.

  So, although Heaney’s status as critic-practitioner is of undoubted signifi- cance, the emphasis in this book is on him as poet, and to a lesser extent as poet-translator engaging with other poets. Heaney was twenty-six when Death of a Naturalist appeared in 1965: young, but not prodigiously so. The reception of that book quickly established him as a major new talent, writing with brilliant linguistic fidelity and evocativeness, mostly about his country upbringing in County Derry. The next book,

  Door into the Dark (1969), confirmed this reputation, in some poems even enhancing it. From the first his gifts were recognised as being of a very specifically poetic kind, founded on an alert eye and linguistic precision. In his

  New Statesman review of Death of a Naturalist, Christopher Ricks said, ‘the power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection

  Death of a Naturalist is

  

Introduction

  outstanding’. C. B. Cox in the Spectator said the poems give us ‘the soil-reek of Ireland’. This tactile accuracy continued to be noted as Heaney’s particular strength in reviews of the next book: sometimes the praise sounds a shade stereotyping, but the purport is clear. In The Times Literary Supplement, Douglas Dunn said of Door into the Dark (1969) in a much-quoted effusion that the poems were ‘loud with the slap of the spade and sour with the stink of turned earth’. Ricks continued in his previous vein in the

  New Statesman by saying – perhaps with a glint of warning – that Heaney would ‘have to reconcile himself to the fact that

  Door into the Dark will consolidate him as the poet of muddy-booted blackberry-picking’. His gifts could be summarised in a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins, passed on to Heaney by the teacher-writer Michael McLaverty, of which he is fond: ‘description is revelation’ (

  N 71). And, while several commentators made even grander claims for Wintering Out in 1972 (Neil Corcoran calls it ₃

  ‘ the seminal single volume of the post-1970 period of English poetry’ ), Heaney’s characteristic strengths were mostly seen as the same: exactness of description and evocation. In

  Wintering Out the descriptive precision was put to further purposes: to evoking the places of his upbringing, often through a semantic dismantling of their etymologies, in the ‘placename poems’ such as ‘

  Broagh’ and ‘Anahorish’. But there is another perspective which always has to be considered in describing the development of any Northern Irish writer in the current era. The most significant departure from the previous volumes in

Wintering Out was a more developed sense of a political context. The poet was writing in a fraught period of history in Northern Ireland. Having grown

  up as the young ‘naturalist’ on a farm in County Derry, in a world where the country poet might trace at leisure the Wordsworthian ‘making of a poet’s mind’, Heaney had moved to Belfast as a gifted student of English at Queen’s University in 1957. But the last third of the twentieth century, when Heaney’s work attained major status, was the most violent period in Northern Irish history. He was a member of a remarkable poetic generation who lived it, at ₄ least to begin with, ‘bomb by bomb’, in Derek Mahon’s famous phrase. Seamus Deane observes that, although ‘political echoes are audible in

  Death of a Naturalist and in Door into the Dark, there is no consciousness of politics as such, and certainly no political consciousness until ₅ Wintering What soon came to be a matter of controversy was the use Out and North’. to which Heaney put – or should put – his undoubted gifts. The change from the descriptive bucolic in the relatively untroubled anti-pastoral of the early poems happens somewhere across the two volumes

  Wintering Out and North. The challenge now was to represent the wider public context as well as to evoke locality. Heaney found, to repeat a line of Yeats which Heaney ₆ has often drawn on himself, a ‘befitting emblem of [the] adversity’ in the

  

The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney

  riven Northern Irish community when he read in 1969 The Bog People by P. V. Glob, a study of what seem to be ritual killings in Iron Age Jutland.

  Glob’s book was illustrated by dramatic photographs of the victims of the killings, whose bodies had been preserved in the bog water. The first Heaney poem to reflect on these images was ‘The Tollund Man’ in Wintering Out, in which he imagines visiting Aarhus where the bodies are kept. There, in ‘the old man-killing parishes’ of Jutland, the poet will recall recent brutal killings in Northern Ireland and he will feel ‘lost, / Unhappy and at home’ (

  WO 48). This poem is a trailer for what is seen as the first substantial change in

  Heaney’s poetic corpus, with North in 1975, at once his most admired and most controversial single volume. The dilemma for the Northern Irish writer has often been noted, by Michael Longley and others: if they wrote about the violence, they were accused of exploiting suffering for their artistic purposes; ₇ if they ignored it, they were guilty of ivory-tower indifference. Heaney said in his interview with John Haffenden, ‘Up to

  North, that was one book’ (

  Viewpoints, p. 64), in an attempt perhaps to escape the two-stranded stereo- typing of the early work, from the bucolic to the symbolising of violence, by bracketing off together the four volumes that between them manifested the two stereotypes. Certainly the more or less unanimous chorus of critical praise becomes less certain after

  North. This sense of uncertainty extends to Heaney himself; several critics, including Seamus Deane and Terence Brown, see guilt as a major factor in the poet’s self-characterisation from this point onwards. One of the reviews of North, by Ciaran Carson in the Honest Ulsterman, has been endlessly quoted as a representation of the case against ‘ the Bog Poems’, as they were called from the first. According to Carson, Heaney had laid himself open to the charge (in fact Carson did not literally level it himself) of being ‘the laureate of violence – a mythmaker, an anthro- pologist of ritual killing … the world of megalithic doorways and charming noble barbarity’.

  Other highly influential voices read North differently. Anthony Thwaite in

  The Times Literary Supplement saw it as a superior continuation of the linguistic and descriptive virtues in the earlier books, with ‘all the sensuous- ness of Mr Heaney’s earlier work, but refined and cut back to the bone’. Even more momentously, Robert Lowell, in the London

  Observer, called it ‘a new kind of political poetry by the best Irish poet since W. B. Yeats’. The parallel with Yeats (Clive James and John Wilson Foster had prophesied it in 1972) in fact applies equally to Carson’s accusation and to Lowell’s tribute. The case against

  North was primarily what has been called ‘the aestheticisation of violence’, a charge most famously made in Irish poetry against the conclusion of Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, that, in the bloody fighting in Dublin, ‘a terrible beauty is born’. And if the sentiment of guilt, seen in Heaney by Deane,

  

Introduction

  Brown, Heaney himself and others, seems like the inevitable confessional product of a Catholic upbringing, we might recall that Yeats, coming from a very different background, shared it in precisely this context, rendered sleepless (at least poetically) in old age by wondering ‘did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot’. In an admiring but dismayed review of

North in the Listener, Conor Cruise O’Brien made the same charge against

  Heaney as he had made in a brilliant and influential essay against Yeats ten ₈ years earlier. Heaney, according to O’Brien, has used his exceptional capa- city for exact description of ‘the thing itself’ to evoke in an unbalanced way the suffering of the Catholics of Northern Ireland: ‘there is no equivalent Protestant voice’. In each case the poet is being accused of using fraught public events to serve a personal cause.

  By the late 1970s, when Heaney was a much more noticeable prose commentator and interviewee, the poet himself wished to change course, away from the political, or at least to be recognised as doing so. If ‘up to North, that was one book’, his new book Field Work was attempting a different kind of style and subject. Partly that book can be seen as a delayed accounting for a major change in Heaney’s life, his moving with his family to Wicklow in the Irish Republic in 1972. His departure from the North of Ireland had been pursued by insults from extremist opponents on the Unionist side (recalling for some readers the Citizen’s catcalls after the departing Bloom in the ‘Cyclops’ chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses), and even with some misgiving by his friends (a state of affairs lamented in the powerful poem ‘

  Exposure’ at the end of North: ‘my friends’ / Beautiful prismatic counselling / And the anvil brains of some who hate me’). The publication of North, three years after the move to Wicklow, meant he could hardly be accused of abandoning the issues of Northern Ireland. But by 1979, he wished to make a new beginning, one which he described in an interview with James Randall in formal terms but with the reminder that ‘a formal decision is never strictly formal’: ‘in the new book

Field Work, I very deliberately set out to lengthen the line again because the narrow line was becoming habit … I wanted to turn

  out, to go out, and I wanted to pitch the voice out … a return to an opener ₉ voice and to a more – I don’t want to say public – but a more social voice.’ The antithesis then is not so much between public and private as between two kinds of public position: the political and what he calls the social.

  From this point onwards Heaney’s writing is increasingly linked to this kind of self-commentary. It is clear now that the public-local opposition interlocks with the political-aesthetic in a complicated way, and the critical discussion of him has centred on that since. But, if

  Field Work is seen, as the poet pleads here, as the start of a post- North era in the work, it is in significant ways a continuation of the established previous concerns too. Amongst the

  

The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney

  most admired poems in Field Work – indeed in the whole corpus – are two great elegies for victims of the Northern violence, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ and ‘Casualty’. These are the poems which address with the greatest directness the questions of guilt and involvement raised in the most unflinching of the Bog Poems, such as ‘Punishment’ where the poet – ‘the artful voyeur’, in the poem’s terms – admits to understanding the ‘tribal, intimate revenge’ of the people who barbarically tarred and feathered Catholic girls who went out with British soldiers. ‘Casualty’ returns to that issue, or stays with it: was Louis O’Neill, the fisherman who was blown up by a bomb after he ignored the curfew imposed by the IRA after Bloody Sunday (seven years earlier than

  Field Work, it should be noted), guilty of some breach of local piety? ‘Puzzle me / The right answer to that one’ is what O’Neill’s voice in the poem says ( FW 23).

  The poems in Field Work that attempt a new beginning – a new bucolics, it seems, circling back to the home district of

  Death of a Naturalist – are outweighed by the public poems: something that the complex claims in the Randall interview seem to concede in the terms ‘public’ and ‘social’. We might remember too that as early as 1972, in his brief introduction to his anthology ₁₀ Heaney had made a strong bid for artistic freedom, three

  Soundings ’72, years before North:

  

I am tired of speculations about the relation of the poet’s work to the workings

of the world he inhabits, and finally I disagree that ‘poetry makes nothing

happen.’ It can eventually make new feelings, or feelings about feelings happen,

and anybody can see that in this country for a long time to come a refinement of

feelings will be more urgent than a reframing of policies or of constitutions.

  There is something forced though about this inversion of the normal under- standing of Auden’s phrase about Yeats, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, which is usually taken to mean that poetry cannot be politically effective. Heaney is saying ‘poetry can make something non-political happen’; but that is not an obvious sense of ‘nothing’ in this context. Clearly the urgency of policies and constitutions in Northern Ireland in 1972 could not be so easily dismissed, as we have seen. And the wish that

  Field Work in 1979 should mark the starting point of a similar new freedom was equally doomed. As it happened, the late 1970s, followed by the hunger strikes of the early 1980 s, was one of the worst periods of the Northern Troubles: hardly a point at which a guilt-inclined and socially aware commentator like Heaney could avoid public attitudes, however much he wanted to escape the ‘responsible tristia’ weighed in ‘Exposure’. Unsurprisingly, Heaney’s next books, the linked works

  Station Island (1984) and Sweeney Astray (1983), are again deeply concerned with issues of public answerability and guilt. The central section of

  Station Island – which is much the longest single volume of

  

Introduction

  Heaney’s – shares the volume’s title, describing a Dante-influenced purgatorial pilgrimage to Lough Derg in County Donegal, a demanding penitential pro- gramme that Heaney undertook three times when he was young. The question of guilt is obviously central here as the narrator/poet encounters figures from his own past life and the literary past.

  By this time too criticism of Heaney is not simply a matter of reviews of individual volumes, laudatory or disapproving as the case might be. There is now a more wide-ranging criticism of Heaney whose work is seen in more general terms, as the exemplary instance of the Yeatsian conflict between artistic freedom and public responsibility. Often the criticism in this area has been remarkably simple-minded: strikingly more so, it might be said, than the poet’s own subtler, well-weighed deliberations. Heaney has often praised Yeats for his ability to live in doubt, between stark alternatives, and Heaney has himself been praised for the possession of this modernist virtue (by Ian Hamilton for instance, or in

  The Sunday Times by John Carey – one of Heaney’s most consistent and most perceptive advocates). But Declan Kiberd argues in a crucial essay that a virtuous political standpoint is not simply a ₁₁ matter of claiming to be in doubt: something we will hear Heaney claiming later on in