HEANEY, Seamus (Justin)

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Nationality: Irish. Born: Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland, 13 April 1939. Education: Anahorish School; St. Columb's College, Londonderry, 1951–57; Queen's University, Belfast, 1957–61, B.A. (honors) in English 1961; St. Joseph's College of Education, Belfast, 1961–62, Cert. Ed. 1962. Family: Married Marie Delvin in 1965; two sons and one daughter. Career: Teacher, St. Thomas's Secondary School, Belfast, 1962–63; lecturer, St. Joseph's College of Education, Belfast, 1963–66; lecturer in English, Queen's University, 1966–72; guest lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1970–71; moved to County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland, 1972; did regular radio work, and teaching at American universities; teacher, Carysfort Training College, Dublin, 1975–81; Allott Lecturer, University of Liverpool, 1978; professor of poetry, Oxford University, 1989–94. Visiting professor, 1982–84, and since 1984 Bovlston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1966; Cholmondeley award, 1967; Faber memorial prize, 1968; Maugham award, 1968; Irish Academy of Letters award, 1971; Denis Devlin memorial award, 1973, 1980; American-Irish Foundation award, 1975; American Academy E.M. Forster award, 1975; Duff Cooper memorial award, 1976; Smith literary award, 1976; Bennett award, 1982; P.E.N. prize, for translation, 1985; Whitbread award, 1987, 1997; Sunday Times Mont Blanc award, 1988; Premio Mondello, Mondello Foundation, Palermo, Sicily, 1993; Nobel prize for literature, 1995. D.H.L.: Fordham University, Bronx, New York, and Queen's University, Belfast, both 1982. Memberships: Irish Academy of Letters; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; American Academy of Arts and Letters; Royal Dublin Society. Address: Department of English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University, Warren House, 11 Prescott Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Eleven Poems. Belfast, Festival, 1965.

Death of a Naturalist. London, Faber, and New York, Oxford University Press, 1966; revised edition, London and Boston, Faber, 1991.

Room to Rhyme, with Dairo Hammond and Michael Longley. Belfast, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1968.

A Lough Neagh Sequence. Manchester, Phoenix Pamphlet Poets Press, 1969.

Door into the Dark. London, Faber, and New York, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Night Drive. Crediton, Devon, Gilbertson, 1970.

Boy Driving His Father to Confession. Frensham, Surrey, Sceptre Press, 1970.

Servant Boy. Detroit, Red Hanrahan Press, 1971.

Land. London, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971.

Wintering Out. London, Faber, 1972; New York, Oxford University Press, 1973.

North. London, Faber, 1975; New York, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Bog Poems. London, Rainbow Press, 1975.

Stations. Belfast, Ulstemman, 1975.

In Their Element: A Selection of Poems, with Derek Mahon. Belfast, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1977.

After Summer. Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, Deerfield Press, 1978.

Hedge School (Sonnets from Glanmore). Newark, Vermont, Janus Press, 1979.

Field Work. London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1979.

Ugolino. Dublin, Andrew Carpenter, 1979.

Selected Poems 1965–1975. London, Faber, 1980.

Poems 1965–1975. New York, Farrar Straus, 1980.

Sweeney Praises the Trees. Privately printed, 1981.

An Open Letter. Londonderry, Field Day Theatre Company, 1983.

Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (includes prose). London-derry, Field Day Theatre Company, 1983; London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1984; revised edition as Sweeney's Flight, 1992.

Station Island. London, Faber, 1984; New York, Farrar Straus, 1985.

Hailstones. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1984.

From the Republic of Conscience. Dublin, Amnesty International, 1985.

The Haw Lantern. London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1987.

Conlan. Baile Atha Cliath, Ireland, Coisceim, 1989.

New Selected Poems 1966–1987. London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1990.

The Tree Clock. Belfast, Linen Hall Library, 1990.

Sweeney's Flight. London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1992.

Seeing Things. New York, Noonday Press, 1993.

The Spirit Level. New York, Farrar Straus, 1996.

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996. New York, Farrar Straus, 1998.

Recording: The Northern Muse, with John Montague, Claddagh, 1968.

Play

The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. London, Faber, 1990.

Other

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

Robert Lowell: A Memorial Lecture and an Eulogy. Privately printed, 1978.

The Making of a Music: Reflections on the Poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats. Liverpool, University of Liverpool Press, 1978.

Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978. London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1980.

Among Schoolchildren. Belfast, John Malone Memorial Committee, 1983.

Verses for a Fordham Commencement (address in verse). New York, Nadja, 1984.

Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland. Grasmere, Trustees of Dove Cottage, 1984.

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

The Place of Writing. Atlanta, Georgia, Scholars Press, 1989.

Dylan the Durable? Bennington, Vermont, Bennington College, 1992.

Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Philip Larkin. Swansea, University College of Swansea, 1993.

The Redress of Poetry. New York, Farrar Straus, 1995.

Homage to Frost, with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott. New York, Farrar Straus, 1996.

Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture. New York, Farrar Straus, 1996.

Diary of One Who Vanished: A Song Cycle by Leoš Janácek in a New Version. London, Faber, 1999.

Editor, with Alan Brownjohn and Jon Stallworthy, New Poems 1970–1971. London, Hutchinson, 1971.

Editor, Soundings 2. Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1974.

Editor, with Ted Hughes, 1980 Anthology: Arvon Foundation Poetry Competition. Todmorden, Lancashire, Kilnhurst, 1982.

Editor, with Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag: An Anthology. London, Faber, 1982.

Editor, The Essential Wordsworth. New York, Ecco Press, 1988.

Translator, The Midnight Verdict. Loughcrew, Old Castle, Gallery, 1993.

Translator, Beowulf. London, Faber, 1999; New York, Farrar Straus, 2000.

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Critical Studies: Seamus Heaney by Robert Buttel, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Bucknell University Press, 1975; Seamus Heaney by Blake Morrison, London, Methuen, 1982; The Art of Seamus Heaney edited by Tony Curtis, Bridgend, Poetry Wales Press, 1982, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour Editions, 1993; Seamus Heaney: A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems 1965–1975 by Nicholas McGuinn, Leeds, Arnold Wheaton, 1986; Seamus Heaney: A Student's Guide by Neil Corcoran, London, Faber, 1986; Seamus Heaney edited by Harold Bloom, New Haven, Connecticut, Chelsea House, 1986; The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper by Elmer Andrews, London, Macmillan, 1988; Seamus Heaney by Ronald Tamplin, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1989; Seamus Heaney by Thomas C. Foster, Boston, Twayne, 1989; The Poetry of Resistance: Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition by Sidney Burris, Athens, Ohio University Press, 1990; Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1 by Desmond Fennell, Dublin, ELO Publications, 1991; Out of Step: Pursuing Seamus Heaney to Purgatory, with drawings, by Catherine Byron, Bristol, Loxwood Stoneleigh, 1992; Seamus Heaney: Poet and Critic by Arthur E. McGuinness, New York, P. Lang, 1993; Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet by Michael Parker, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1993;Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney by Michael R. Molino, Washington D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 1994; The Achievement of Seamus Heaney by John Wilson Foster, Dublin, Lilliput Press, 1995; The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1995, and Seamus Heaney, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1998, both by Helen Vendler;Seamus Heaney edited by Michael Allen, New York, St Martin's Press, 1997; The Poetry of Seamus Heaney edited by Elmer Andrews, Duxford, England, Icon Books, 1998, and New York, Columbia University Press, 2000.

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As an Ulster Catholic, Seamus Heaney has always been aware of the complex and violent history that has gone to shape modern Ireland. In "Shoreline" (Door into the Dark) he hears in the tide, "rummaging in /At the foot of all fields," echoes of successive waves of invaders—Celts, Danes, Normans; in North he writes of "those fabulous raiders," the Vikings, "ocean-deafened voices /warning me, lifted again /in violence and epiphany." Elsewhere in the same volume "Ocean's Love to Ireland" recalls, in a sinister compounding of copulation and murder that is a recurring motif, the complicity of the courtier-poet Raleigh in the Irish massacres, while "Bog Oak" (Wintering Out) insinuates with a cool obliqueness, into the "dreaming sunlight" of Edmund Spenser's pastoral, hints of the atrocities he supervised. "For the Commander of the 'Eliza"'" and "At a Potato Digging" evoke the Great Hunger and the ruthless expediencies of British rule in 1845. "Docker," with a forced but urgent understanding, depicts the Northern Protestant not only to recall past bigotry but also to offer, in 1966, prophetic anticipation of its renewal ("That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic— /Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again").

From his first volume onward, Heaney has written extensively of the strenuous, unremitting life of rural labor in County Derry and beyond. Many of the poems celebrate the people, crafts, and skills that sustain communal life; others, such as "The Wool Trade" or "Traditions," explore the linguistic and commercial nexus that "beds us down into /the British isles." In many poems Heaney effects a remarkable transition between manual and mental labor, the currencies of material life and of language. In "Digging," the first poem of his first volume, this theme is already enunciated; the poet digs with his pen as his father and grandfather dug with their spades the rich peat of Ireland. Violence is hinted at by the simile that adds a third implement to the human repertoire ("The squat pen rest; snug as a gun"). The title poem of Death of a Naturalist extends this menace, recalling the poet as a boy sickened by the pools of frog spawn that tell of a repulsive world beyond the human: "The great slime kings /Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew /That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it." Throughout the volume the water rat recurs as the image of an alien yet terrifyingly familiar world, a world finally admitted in "Personal Helicon" to be close to the poet's own creative springs, as, "pry[ing] into roots … finger[ing] slime," this "big-eyed Narcissus" is startled by a rat that "slapped across my reflection."

Poetry itself is a "door into the dark," where we seek our own carnal origins, and "Bogland" and "Bann Clay" stress this symbolic digging for a lost, primordial center of being: "Under the humus and roots /This smooth weight. I labour /towards it still. It holds and gluts." The very language in which Heaney writes partakes of this glutinous physical presence. There is a tactile, viscous quality to his words, speaking of "the sucking clabber" of water, the "soft gradient /of consonant, vowel-meadow," or "the tawny guttural water" that "spells itself." "Anahorish," "Toome," and "Broagh" (Wintering Out) explore the very sounds of the old Irish words, stressing their status as material utterance, the muscular effort of a "guttural muse" whose "uvula grows /vestigial" ("Traditions"). In poems such as "Gifts of Rain" or "Oracle" the human organs of communication are in turn transferred to nature ("small mouth and ear /in a woody cleft, /lobe and larynx /of the mossy places"). Throughout North language is equated with the rich, secretive loam of the Irish bog, which engulfs and preserves but which can be kindled over and over into meaning, as the title poem indicates: "Lie down /in the word-hoard, burrow /the coil and gleam /of your furrowed brain. /Compose in darkness." The whole volume is as much about the difficulty of poetic composition as about the fratricidal decomposition of Ireland; death and love, language, poetry, and politics converge in poem after poem. Several poems, developing the insight of "Tollund Man" (Wintering Out), draw upon P.V. Glob's book The Bog People for a potent imagery of atrocity. In Glob's photographs of those ancient human sacrifices, preserved by the "dark juices" of the Danish peat bog, Heaney finds an analogy to the role of the modern Irish poet, the "artful voyeur" who is both an accomplice and helpless witness to "the exact /and tribal, intimate revenge" spoken of in a poem such as "Punishment." Superficially much influenced by Ted Hughes, Heaney in this double understanding of complicity and betrayal perhaps establishes his own distinctive moral and emotional stance. Unlike Hughes, however, he is finally concerned with the redemption, not the dismissal, of the human, its exhumation from a "mother ground /… sour with the blood /of her faithful."

Field Work skillfully balances the parochial and a larger world, as in "The Skunk," where in a California setting Heaney deliberately estranges the traditional glamour of the love poem. But the prevailing mood of the volume is elegiac, and in the title sequence it speaks of a world "stained /to perfection," making those local deaths of which it speaks elsewhere part of a universal loss and abandonment that is nevertheless the ground, the true field, within which human life is fulfilled. The title Field Work points the way to his later developments, poised equivocally between the local—the real fields and hedges of this sequence, from which the particular poetic talent emerged—and the larger field of meanings within which that life now finds itself, which, as indicated in a poem such as "A Postcard from North Antrim," is always elsewhere. Identity now is found in otherness and displacement, both in the literal and in the psychoanalytic sense, for it is only from outside the field that the pattern of forces can be understood rather than simply suffered. This is the point of the important lecture Place and Displacement that Heaney delivered at Dove Cottage (Wordsworth's home in the Lake District) in 1984, seeing in the uprootedness of the returning native Wordsworth a model for all subsequent poetic displacements. Contemporary Northern Irish poetry, he says, reveals the same double displacement:

The good place where Wordsworth's nurture happened and to which his habitual feelings are most naturally attuned has become … the wrong place. He is displaced from his own affection by a vision of the good that is located elsewhere. His political, utopian aspirations deracinate him from the beloved actuality of his surroundings so that his instinctive being and his appetitive intelligence are knocked out of alignment. He feels like a traitor among those he knows and loves.

The way to cope with "the strain of being in two places at once, of needing to accommodate two opposing conditions of truthfulness simultaneously," is not despair, however, but rather Jung's strategy of finding a "displaced perspective" in which the suffering individual must outgrow particularist allegiance while managing to "keep faith with … origins," "stretched between politics and transcendence … displaced from a confidence in a single position by his disposition to be affected by all positions, negatively rather than positively capable."

The echo of Keats's "negative capability" as an answer to Wordsworth's "egotistical sublime" indicates the way out Heaney was to find from the Northern Irish deadlock from Field Work onward. It is in the "lyric stance," in language as itself a site of displacement, "the whispering gallery of absence," "the voice from beyond," that the writer can seek the hopeful imaginary resolution of real conflicts. Heaney's poetry has pursued language as political metaphor and metonymy through to its source, to a recognition of language as both the place of necessary exile and the site of a perpetual return home. Station Island is the product of such a recognition, a volume full of departures and returns, its title sequence "of dream encounters with familiar ghosts" set on that island in Lough Derg that is a traditional place of penitential pilgrimage. The book explores the guilt of such meetings with the dead, returning from a remove to make peace with that which has been abandoned. Displacement is here seen not as exile but as freedom, whether in the wild blue yonder of America or the poetically licensed otherworlds of Dante's Divine Comedy. The loving fidelity of the émigré who is nevertheless just "visiting" that which he has left behind provides the motive force for the volume. In a poem ironically entitled "Away from It All," Heaney uses one of his most bathetic figures, a lobster taken out of its tank in a restaurant, to acknowledge that a person cannot go home again. The lobster is the "hampered one, out of water, /fortified and bewildered." But if this is a figure of the poet, always about to be devoured for someone else's alien enjoyment, he suffers as much because he cannot clear his head of all the lives he has left behind, for whom he still feels remotely responsible.

This anxiety explains the poet's identification in the third part of the book with the seventh-century Irish king Sweeney, "transformed into a bird-man and exiled to the trees by the curse of St. Ronan" and finding in madness a relief from misery. The identification is strong enough to have led Heaney to translate the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne in Sweeney Astray, a volume that, in combining his own inimitable style with fidelity to the original, provides an instance of the delicate relation between Heaney's aspirant talent and his native realm. "The First Gloss," which opens "Sweeney Redivivus," sums up this relation in miniature with its multiple puns: "Subscribe to the first step taken /from a justified line /into the margin." His Sweeney also finds himself, in "Sweeney Redivivus,"

     incredible to myself,
   among people far too eager to believe me
   and my story, even if it happened to be true.

But in The Haw Lantern Heaney has gone a step further, beyond the margins altogether, to deconstruct those blarney-laden stories, decentering and redefining a self-congratulatory Irishness. In the words of the title poem, it is not enough to bask in "a small light for small people." The modest wish to "keep /the wick of self-respect from dying out, /not having to blind them with illumination" is too limited, too easy an ambition. Now "it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes /with his lantern, seeking one just man" to be the true measure of this field, scrutinizing with a gaze that makes "you flinch… its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you." The terror of being tested, assayed, and assessed, as well as the fraught yearning for clearance, runs through most of the poems in the volume. At its most literal in "From the Frontier of Writing" the fear is at once transformed into a parable in the harrowing encounter with an army roadblock, where "everything is pure interrogation /until a rifle motions and you move." "Parable Island" tells us that there are no authenticating origins, only a plethora of storytellings that push the origin further back into an original emptiness, scrawled over with too much meaning. It is in this area of secondary signification that Ireland "begins." As "The Mud Vision" indicates, there can be no final clearance, no return to an original clarity:

                What might have been origin
   We dissipated in news. The clarified place
   Had retrieved neither us nor itself—except
   You could say we survived.

Heaney, of course, has done more than survive; he has found a clear, clean space of demarcation. His images steer increasingly toward an aesthetic connotation above a religious one. In Seeing Things a biretta the poet remembers from his altar days has the poignancy of the immediately nostalgic instead of the weight of the religious. Heaney's deepest interior mythology is of the earth, but even if he drifts in his later work from the regimentations of traditional Catholicism, he does not drift from Catholicism's atmosphere or perspectives. Indeed, the marvelous in Seeing Things creates its own sense of the atmospheric:

   The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
   Were all at prayers inside the oratory
   A ship appeared above them in the air.
   The anchor dragged along behind so deep
   It hooked itself into the alter rails
   And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
   A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
   And struggled to release it. But in vain.
   'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'
   The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
   They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
   Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

This is a world in which air and water refuse translation; otherworldly qualities overlap with the worldly.

Indeed, lyric poetry doubtlessly has no greater advocate than Heaney, a poet who carries on the important tradition of reading aloud. His 1996 collection The Spirit Level contains some of the language's most memorable lyric lines, as, for example, in "Postscript":

   And some time make the time to drive out west
   Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
   In September or October, when the wind
   And the light are working off each other
   So that the ocean on one side is wild
   With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
   The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
   By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
   Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
   Their fully grown head
   strong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
   Useless to think you'll park and capture it
   More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
   A hurry through which known and strange things pass
   As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
   And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

—Stan Smith and

Martha Sutro