Seamus Heaney was, for good or ill, internationally the most prominent and the most popular Irish poet of the latter part of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first. His work is judged, and often considered superior to, that of a presumed super-league of poets in English from formerly colonised countries, a super-league including the West Indian Derek Walcott and the Australian Les Murray. Heaney’s predominance is “for good or ill” in the sense that he proved a more criticised figure in Ireland than was the case beyond. The consistently pastoral focus of his work, for instance (work which is often centred upon the rural community and landscape of Mossbawn in Co. Derry where he was brought up), is seen to be out of kilter with life in modern Ireland, north or south of the border. More significantly and symptomatically, Heaney’s work proved controversial in the context of the sectarian north of the island where he was raised. Protestant commentators sometimes saw his concentration upon the traditions of the Catholic minority as tantamount to making him an I. R. A. spokesman. Nationalists seeking a united Ireland, meanwhile, resented his lack of volubility on political issues and saw him as too ready to compromise with the literary establishment in London for his own ends. Heaney always proved himself personally and poetically tactful, shrewd, and sure-footed in walking this difficult line between competing religious, social, and political pressures. However, yet further commentators have seen that very surefootedness as compromising Heaney’s poetic voice, and been disappointed by the calmness and measuredness of the writing.
Having said that, the development of Heaney’s poetry often manifested a canny and clear-eyed responsiveness to changing patterns of violence and peace-seeking across the last thirty years of the twentieth century. His first two collections, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), largely written before the renewed outbreak of the so-called Troubles in 1968, showed Heaney alerting his audience to the violent history of colonisation on his native ground, but preoccupied also by the rhythms of life in a rural setting remembered from his childhood. He also, in a Wordsworthian manner, focused upon the sources and resources of his own poetic voice and power. With Wintering Out, and more specifically North (published two years after the British government had taken back direct rule over the north of Ireland), Heaney sought to find historical and mythic analogies for the plight in which the minority found itself. In Field Work the political debate was out in the open in a more resonant and Yeatsian way than hitherto; with Station Island, written after the deaths of the hunger-strikers and the so-called ‘dirty protests’ in prisons, Heaney more directly pondered the relevance of his poetry in time of violence and polarisation. The late-1980s, after the signing of the Anglo-Irish agreement which brought about new administrative exchange between Dublin, Belfast, and London, also brought a new tone of lightness, the exploration of new possibilities and other ways of seeing into the poetry. This change was confirmed after the I.R.A. cessation of violence in 1994, and later the signing of the Good Friday agreement, in that Heaney’s subsequent volumes of poetry, including The Spirit Level, Electric Light, District and Circle, and Human Chain saw him turning away from immediate political issues to consider further, even numinous, ideas and envisagings.
This map of Heaney’s career against the changing history of the north of Ireland is, of course, extremely crude, and easily contradicted by references to specific poems in the individual volumes: not all the poems ‘fit’ the suggested pattern. It is also part of Heaney’s cleverness, canniness and responsiveness that he remained ahead of the game. Yet the map offered does, to an extent, help to explain the seemingly bewildering shifts of manner and style between various collections; say between the magisterial and polished sonorities of Field Work and the much more provisional and uncertain tone of parts of Station Island. In between, the government of Margaret Thatcher had arrived in the UK – a government initially at least wholly hostile to the cause of those seeking a united Ireland, as Heaney did – and the kinds of outspokenness which even the reticent Heaney had felt confident to utter in the late 1970s, in the hope of a shift of political attitudes from the Labour government of that time, were now silenced. Heaney, in the title sequence of Station Island, registered the sectarian violence and the hunger strikes, but also turned inward as he had done in his first collections to reconsider influences upon his own writing. Those influences are all Irish, but nonetheless the sequence is finally more concerned with the nature of his own poetic, and the need to develop an original and individual note, sensitive but also resistant to historical issues.
Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark had found analogies for Heaney’s developing poetic craft in the rural trades of his childhood such as potato-digging, thatching, and black-smithing, as well as in more spiritual or mystical employments such as water-divining. The natural world, in ways premonitory perhaps of the historical tragedy of the land itself, is often threatening, dangerous, or – as in “Blackberry Picking” where the bathful of picked fruit immediately starts to rot – disappointing. What was immediately noted about the poems in these collections was the physically rugged, alliterative, and often onomatopoeic style of the writing. It is a style clearly learnt from Gerard Manley Hopkins, but a style which Heaney is anxious, in early reflections upon his art like the essay “Feeling into Words”, to suggest linked to his Co. Derry spoken accent. The physicality of the writing is, in other words, at one remove from the smooth Received Pronunciation through which most poetry in the English tradition is communicated. It is a writing which is also anxious to probe and delve into the local landscape in an attempt to discover some unconscious or preconscious poetic resource. Death of a Naturalist, for instance, deliberately ends upon a celebration of Heaney’s early love of wells, a celebration that continued across his career. In the last lines of “Personal Helicon”, having described the joy of setting echoes going by calling down into the darkness of the well, he makes the analogy explicit: “I rhyme/ To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”.
This distance from standard spoken English or Received Pronunciation, in terms of sound and linguistic resonance, became sharper in Wintering Out (1971), Heaney’s first collection after the renewed outbreak of violence in the north of Ireland. Various of the poems there strike their note of communal intimacy and distance from the language of the coloniser by considering issues of pronunciation and vocabulary. This is most famously marked in connection with those poems such as “Broagh” and “Anahorish” which continue the tradition in Gaelic Irish poetry of meditation upon particular places and place-names. “Broagh” concludes by drawing out attention to “that last/gh” in the place’s name, which “the strangers found/difficult to manage”. Other poems here, like “Servant Boy”, “The Last Mummer” and “Midnight”, find analogies for the oppressed minority and sectarian history in local social and cultural tradition, and in the natural life of the land. “Traditions” itself reminds us that “our guttural muse” – the local idiom again – had long been superseded by literate English voices, with consequent loss of a sense of national identity. “Our” here is exclusive, in other words; Heaney’s publisher for the collection is London-based, but the inclusive and communal address of the poem is not to the British. Most telling in reminding us of the divisions upon the ground, however, is “The Other Side”, in which a Protestant neighbouring farmer comments upon his fertile land in contrast to the barrenness of Heaney’s family’s fields: “his fabulous, biblical dismissal,/that tongue of the chosen people”.
North (1975), the central sequence of which broods upon bodies recovered from bogland – victims of ancient ritual killings as well as more recent victims of the Troubles – picked up upon Wintering Out’s initiatory “Tollund Man” in controversial ways. The linguistic and philological enquiry continues from the earlier collection in poems such as “Bone Dreams”. But many Irish commentators, including those such as the poet Ciaran Carson who favoured Heaney’s general political aspirations, felt that the overall note of the collection was too fatalistic, and that violence was being celebrated there almost for its own sake. Key poems like “Punishment” notoriously make their complicity with the instinct behind revenge killings explicit, and there, as in other poems meditating upon the bodies of female victims like “Bog Queen” and “Strange Fruit”, many readers feel uneasy about the aestheticization of the gaze which describes the victim’s body. Heaney, self-reprimandingly, calls himself “the artful voyeur” in “Punishment”; but this is not sufficient, in its very coyness perhaps, to dispel the sense that Heaney’s art moved too close to relishing victimhood and murder (whatever the dubious gender implications) and to seeing violence as mythically inevitable in this northern context. The title poem, “North”, which remembers Viking raids upon Ireland, listens to “ocean-deafened voices” from the remote past recalling “exhaustions nominated peace/memory incubating spilled blood”, and those voices resonate across the book as a whole.
More successful, perhaps, are the poems in the second part of North which are straightforwardly autobiographical, coming close to Wordsworth’s The Prelude in the nature of their linkage between the poet’s early experience and the characteristics of his mature creativity. “Exposure”, the famous set-piece poem with which the collection ends, registers the fact that Heaney is now himself removed from the “massacre” with which so much of the collection had been preoccupied. He moved his family south to the Republic of Ireland in the early 1970s when the chance came to live rent-free in a cottage in Wicklow so as to be able to further concentrate upon writing. North, as a result, manifests Heaney’s last sense of day-to-day intimacy with the violence in the province of his birth, an intimacy which brought about an unease for both native and other readers.
Field Work, which followed four years later in 1979, took much of its tone from the rural quietude of the new Wicklow surroundings, measuring its version of pastoral against that of the English tradition. Heaney keeps his distance from earlier English celebrations of the golden age; the third of the central sequence of sonnets opens with the appropriate note of wariness: “This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake/ (So much, too much) consorted at twilight”. The collection continues with Heaney brooding upon the violence in the north and on his responsibility as a poet, but it does so now in a magisterial and declarative way which owes much to Yeats’ influence and something also to that of Heaney’s American poet friend, Robert Lowell. The book’s elegies for victims of the violence, “The Strand at Lough Beg”, “A Postcard from North Antrim” and “Casualty”, ask crucial questions about the purpose of, and relationship between, art and violence. In another poem of memory, “The Harvest Bow”, Heaney’s underlying ambivalence about such relationship at this stage is punningly contained. A harvest bow is a small and fragile gift, often a love-token, made from cut wheat, but, Heaney concludes,
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser.
The “end”, presumably, meaning “the purpose” of art; but also “the end” meaning that art cannot survive in times of peace – something Yeats explored in major late works like “The Tower”.
In the central sequence of Station Island (1984), these issues are raised again, but in ways that conjure the ritual and rhythms of Heaney’s Catholic upbringing. The sequence is heavily influenced by Dante and is constructed through a series of imagined encounters with ghostly figures of now-dead friends from Heaney’s own past and with literary precursors – William Carleton, Patrick Kavanagh and James Joyce. The contemporary situation is present in many poems, most noticeably in section vii recalling in detail the death of a shopkeeper in a sectarian attack. But the urge not to be dictated to as a poet by circumstance comes through in the final section, in which Joyce’s imagined speech enjoins the later poet to follow his example and be playful, unhampered, not to “be so earnest./ Let go, let fly, forget”. The final section of poetry in the volume, voiced for the mythic early king of Ireland, Sweeney, who was supposedly made to fly when changed into a bird for his sacrilege against early Christian influence in Ireland, accordingly, shows Heaney in more playful and exuberant mode. Yet the over-riding note of this collection is one of resignation in a political impasse, because Heaney, as another poem “Sandstone Keeper” acknowledges, is not “about to set times wrong or right”. Instead, as a poet, he must stoop along, “one of the venerators”.
From this perspective The Haw Lantern (1987) seems a transitional work. It contains a marvellous central sonnet sequence on the death of Heaney’s mother, but is largely made up of Audenesque parables reflecting on the political and historical situation. These lyrics show also the depth of Heaney’s reading in Eastern European poetry which at the time he felt provided some parallel to his own situation. It is in the next collection of 1991, Seeing Things, that some of the linguistic experiment of earlier work found its maturity. Now Heaney strikes his own note unreservedly, particularly in “Squarings”, a long sequence of improvisatory short lyrics which takes up snapshots from Heaney’s experience, from earlier literature, and from works of art. Just as the previous collection had partially focused upon the death of his mother, Seeing Things is dominated now by the death of Heaney’s father. The central metaphor of the book is about a crossing-over from one state of being to another, from past to present and vice versa, from life into death, from Ireland to England.
It is possible, again, to read this as a response to more optimistic political signs in Ireland at that time, but that emphasis is subliminal. Rather, Heaney celebrates the way in which realities can momentarily interconnect and exchange experiences. The classic statement of this comes in the version of the early story of a ship that appeared in the air at Clonmacnoise monastery, snagging on the altar-rail. A man climbs down the anchor rope to free the ship, then climbs back “out of the marvellous as he had known it.” Such marvellous changes are wrought by Heaney in this collection with a good deal of humour and also tenderness; with the poetic imagination clearly and confidently cast as central to such transformative possibilities. Sound, music and musicality recur throughout, and the language of the writing is much more extravagant and unpredictable, and more relaxed than anything in earlier Heaney, as is evident in the following:
Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening directly into starlight.
This is notational writing, the connections between phrases and sentences not always made clear, but the shifts of tense and perspectives are key to the various transitions the poetry achieves and become both its mode and its message.
Many critics saw The Spirit Level (1996 – the year after Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize), and Electric Light (2001), as marking a falling-off from the earlier work. The former book continues much of the emphasis and formal technique of “Squarings”, insisting that “spirit” resides in everyday objects. There are some real achievements here – “A Sofa in the Forties”, “Damson”, “St Kevin and the Blackbird”, “Postscript”, and the remarkable sestina “Two Lorries”. But there is also the feeling of a need to be “Keeping Going” through it all, as the title of a poem addressed to Heaney’s brother Hugh, who stayed as a farmer in the North despite local sectarian killings, has it. “Tollund”, a revisiting of the site of the first “bog poem” from Wintering Out in the wake of the 1994 ceasefire by the IRA, marks the relief that at last things might change, but suggests that it might also be too late, or that the new conditions arrive only as an afterlife for many of the participants in the Troubles: the “we” of the poem emerge as “ghosts who’d walked abroad/Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning”. The poem is notable also for its fraught sense that modernity irredeemably disturbs and displaces those things which were once held sacred, a view that trammels other late work, and drives Heaney towards resistance and quest for continuity.
For The Spirit Level also establishes what will form that keynote of the later collections of poetry, consistency within changed circumstances, as, now out of the Troubles, Ireland began fully establishing itself as a modern nation amongst other European nations. That paradoxical sense of being “lost,/Unhappy, and at home” from as far back as Wintering Out’s statement-of-intent “The Tollund Man” becomes a kind of characterising aspect of the poetic persona from this point onwards. This is a slightly tentative voice, always anxious about being sidelined or overlooked in the rush towards a new condition, but also recognising the potential advantages and opportunities in speaking from this distant perspective. In this sense, the persona of the sequence “Mycenae Lookout” from The Spirit Level is representative and originatory of much later work by Heaney. Waiting back in Greece for the news that the Trojan War has come to some conclusion, this speaker however also attains a pivotal and nourishing part within history, precipitating vengeance and so a “peace” that concludes unfinished business from that War. The final poem in the sequence rejoices in this freedom through celebration of newly-flowing water, “the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps/and gushing taps”.
Such imagery consciously connects the historical drama of ancient Greece, much as Heaney’s Irish precursors W.B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh had, back into the everyday world of his own early upbringing at this pivotal moment of new beginning in Ireland. As “Mint,” also from The Spirit Level, has it, such continuities must, for Heaney, underpin any achievement of selfhood through poetry. “Mint” is the first of a string of “herbals” and “florals” which also underpin the later work, but is emblematic in taking as its subject a plant that is “unverdant” and “almost beneath notice”. Yet the mere proliferation of this remembered mint patch near his family home shows “promise”, and the lesson to be learnt from it is that “My last things will be first things slipping from me,” together with the injunction to “let all things go free that have survived”.
Electric Light again shows something of a similar seeking-to-come-to-terms with the new situation, together with the need to identify continuities from first to last, through Irish history (“The Loose Box” has a section on Michael Collins) and through the self, including through the self’s early encounters with literature and parallel contexts to Heaney’s own life experiences. The sequence “Sonnets from Hellas” again links the bloody history of early Greece to events from the Troubles; in a more benign vein, Heaney in another sequence here, “The Real Names,” follows his friend Ted Hughes’s “take” on Shakespeare as a kind of racy, provisional writer, in this instance to be remembered from school performances – “will it be/Ariel or the real name, the already/Featly sweetly tuneful Philip Coulter?” Identity and performance, or identity as performance, flitters across all of Heaney’s later work, now that some uneasy peace has arrived on the ground, and the limitation forced by the need for declared familial or religious, political, and cultural affiliation has been alleviated.
Strikingly in later Heaney, this seeking for parallels which can speak to, but also expand upon, personal or communal historical experience took on an increasingly concerted practice of translation. The 1983-4 publication of Sweeney Astray, the book-length version of a Middle Irish epic, as an accompaniment to Station Island, was followed by versions for the stage initiated by the politically-interventionist The Cure at Troy for the Field Day Theatre Company in 1990, and subsequently The Burial at Thebes of 2004. Heaney’s award-winning translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf appeared in 1999, and that of the Latin poet Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI posthumously (2016). But, more generally, translated work had formed an increasing part of the substance of individual poetry collections – the versions of Virgil’s Eclogues in Electric Light, for example, through to ‘A Herbal,’ a version from the French poet Eugène Guillevic, in Heaney’s last book of poems, Human Chain (2010). In each case, Heaney’s work in other languages enacts the literal meaning of “translation”, a carrying-across, or bringing-home, of the ‘foreign’ text, making it an analogous counterpart of Irish history and culture through use of dialect or otherwise recognisable intonation.
Human Chain, and its precursor poem collection, District and Circle (2006), continued that enquiry into freedoms and poetic stance towards the past that had been instigated through poems such as “Mint”. This is literally so in the formal nature of these later works; District and Circle rehearses again centrally what also became the key formal choice behind Human Chain - a return to the sonnet, which Heaney had deployed resonantly since Field Work. In both collections there is a reaching-back to early memories, school-days, but also a sense that the perspective has altered. “The Aerodrome” in District and Circle recalls the young poet standing with a female relative during World War Two, staring through the link-fence at an American airbase near his home. The speaker concludes that “If self is a location, so is love”, which in turn gives a lifelong sense that “dug heels, a distance” provide “Here and there and now and then, a stance”. It is out of the past that the present self takes its bearings, and must remain resolute to that end. The title sequence in this collection finds the poet abroad in London, in the Tube, amidst disconnections and apprehensions in the modern city, but still “Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof” and wishing about that feeling that “it could have lasted”. Similarly, in his version of Guillevic in Human Chain the poet voices that “I had my existence. I was there./ Me in place and the place in me”.
The comfort and at-homeness of this resonant late work allows a great relish for words, which are held up and prized for themselves – “Nonce Words” in District and Circle or “An Old Refrain” in the last book would be good examples. There is also greater trust in the swiftly notational, and in poems which simply form glosses on other texts. In similar vein to this aspect of his work, Heaney had continued an oblique commentary on his own progress across his career through his essays on other writers. Much of the prose writing, and especially the lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry collected as The Redress of Poetry (1995) or the occasional pieces gathered in Finders Keepers (2002), suggest that poetry’s power throughout time resides in its ability to triumph over constraining historical or social conditions and to strike an irrefutable music which can be relished almost for its own sake. This took an intriguing turn in 2008 with the release of what is Heaney’s most extensive meditation upon his own first place, and the development of his poetry through each book, the kind-of-autobiography created through his dialogue exchanges with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones. This book, together with the publication of annotated editions of Heaney’s translations, collected poems, and selected correspondence, plus a biography, from his major publisher, is sure to extend Heaney’s reach and significant voice and place within modern poetry far ahead, as is the recording of his reading of all of his poems down to District and Circle released from RTE in 2009.
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Citation: Matthews, Steven. "Seamus Heaney". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2002; last revised 28 July 2023. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2054, accessed 16 October 2024.]
