Famous Heaney
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The Poems of Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber, 2025, pp. 1296, £40.00
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber, 2023, pp.848, £18.00
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Canto 11 of the Purgatorio finds Virgil and the pilgrim-Dante at the first terrace of Pride. Oderisi, thirteenth-century manuscript-illuminator, appears and warns:
The roar of earthly fame is just a breath
of wind, blowing from here and then from there,
that changes names in changing origin.
Each penitent, here, whether atoning for pride in noble birth or artistic skill, is bent low under form-warping stones for punishment, ironising the lightness of earthbound renown and the cumbersome seriousness with which they once took themselves: these shades, that is, are heavy with their weightlessness. Seamus Heaney was another writer well versed in fame. He was – and remains – the public’s poet: Nobel Laureate par excellence; worldwide syllabi stalwart; the literati’s pastoral ambassador; Faber & Faber through and through; the anthologist’s dream; and lyric verse’s vox populi. All in all, Heaney is still de facto High Priest for the acceptable face of verse. Indeed, he is one of my earlier literary memories, having encountered him, as so many have, at comprehensive school. There we read neat and peaty poems about digging, ponds and distant dads; we connected them, with equal neatness, to The Troubles, the Irish Potato Famine, and to various dilemmas of family and nationhood. His reputation precedes him, he is to blame for countless literary careers and his legacy knows many a famous passage.
Even now, Heaney’s lines – whether I like it or not – live by my heart: ‘Between my finger and thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.’ (‘Digging’); ‘Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting’ (‘Death of a Naturalist’); ‘space is a salvo, / We are bombarded by the empty air’ (‘Storm on the Island’). But the heart will so easily obscure the ear. It can, that is, be hard to hear these poems amid the adulating din, the whirlwinds of media storm and the mediations of the poetry business – to read, in other words, against the noise. Luckily, though, we now have a good chance to try and listen anew. This year, Faber published The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis, which gathers up Heaney’s fourteen poetry collections, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Human Chain (2010), alongside all uncollected and some previously unpublished poems – with commentary and textual history. And this comes after 2023’s The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid, which covers fifty years of the poet’s correspondences. Each is a monumental effort, together totalling some two thousand pages, and, in their weight alone, describe Heaney’s exhausting and exhaustive literary life.
Very quickly, one can see why Heaney endures. First, there is his indefatigable labour and dedication to friends, family and public commitments. The Letters amass a purgatorial paper mountain the poet circled, penitentially, until his last days: writing politely to acquaintances, encouraging fellow poets, indulging literary critics and humouring hangers-on with near-inhuman goodwill. Early on, he writes brightly: ‘I am convinced I am one of the lucky authors who has found an ideal audience.’ In 1982, he lamented to Ted Hughes: ‘I’m beginning to write, by Christ, as if I were doing one long poetry reading.’ By 1988, he was banqueting with Andrew Neil and Rupert Murdoch – and nothing’s worth that.
It’s a miracle, really, that he found any time to write. But write he did. Again, the wide-ranging appeal is clear: Heaney’s poems are replete with nifty metaphor and simile, knowing rhyme work and meaningful line breaks, an intimate relation of grace and bathos inflected, always, with a kind of demotic tenderness. They are both teachable and quotable. See, for instance: ‘And here is love / like a tinsmith’s scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin’ (‘Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication’); ‘Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life / Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse / Of a sawn down tree’ (‘Album’); or ‘Lupins’:
They stood. And stood for something. Just by standing.
In waiting. Unavailable. But there
For sure. Sure and unbending.
Rose-fingered dawn’s and midnight’s flower.
Here, the titular flowers stand in perfect ambiguous equipoise: they are both vague (‘And stood for something’) and resolute (‘And stood for something’), depending on the whims of vocal stress. That is, the poem is doubtful about its own precious ambivalence, and shivers dutifully under our close reading. ‘For sure’ is worriedly self-assuring, and the rhyme of ‘standing’ wilts in ‘unbending’, just as ‘Just by standing’ hesitates in doing itself justice and lapses, instead, into a poem and a poet struck with bystander syndrome. It is both Homeric war ode (‘Rose fingered dawn’) and non-event (‘In waiting’), a militant-pastoral ever committed to its own non-committal poetics; defensive, self-justifying and knowing: ‘And none of this surpassed our understanding’.
It is no surprise that Heaney is loved by Christopher Ricks. It is a poetics of careful music, precise phrasing and gentle moral inquisition; but it is also one kept in line by public pressure and the need to speak to and for the people – and thereby maintain mainstream literary traditions. It is conservative verse. Indeed, Heaney had little time – though no real ire – for the radical work of, say, J. H. Prynne and the Cambridge School, once calling them, in an interview, a ‘kind of cult that shuns general engagement’. We find a similar feeling in the Letters. After arriving in Berkeley, where he would teach for many years, he half-jokingly scorned the ‘Hippies, drop outs, freak-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, Hare Krishna American kids with shaved heads, begging bowls […] most of them, stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible, assholes (assholes or cunts, I hear you cry).’ Here, there is even a tantalising reference to Charles Olson, whose first volume of seminal Maximus Poems amusingly predated Death of a Naturalist by six years. But Heaney preferred, for better or worse, what he called ‘A middle way that’s neither glib / Nor apocalyptic’. Of course, this isn’t the end of the world – but there’s also no saying quite what it is.
Indeed, aside from the occasionally weird-ish prose-poem, Heaney mostly resisted any radical formal calling and sustained, instead, his skill for needle-fine ambiguities and deft half-rhymes throughout his career. He resisted, too, incessant calls to comment too directly upon Ireland’s political violence. It is a private lyric voice continually registered against the public poet’s duty: the penance, sadly, due to one who encourages ‘public engagement’. Of course, this requires a certain moral courage; and it perhaps explains why so much of Heaney’s writing comes under the sign of ars poetica: always having to justify his craft against extremities of all kinds. No wonder, then, he turned to Dante to navigate the earthly roar. Collections like Station Island (1984) and Seeing Things (1991), and many other single poems, are deeply indebted to Dante’s musical innovations and ethical inquisitions – the Italian exile frequently works as a guideline for a life lit by twin spirits: the desire to write and the duty to write.
Station Island, in particular, becomes the dilemma’s most fretful voicing. The title-sequence describes a pilgrimage to said island on which the poem’s ‘I’ encounters various apparitions from both literary history and reality. Or, as the commentary tells us: ‘The poem was to trace a metamorphosis of spirit released from the fetlocks of tribal allegiance’. Or, as Heaney writes in a letter: it is ‘vaguely Dantesque, involving confrontations with various people/parts of myself, and the questions plied are those of fidelity/infidelity, community/self, a kind of search for end-of-“Casualty” freedom’. Or, finally, as the poem itself has it:
You saw that, and you wrote that – not the fact.
You confused evasion and artistic tact.
The Protestant who shot me through the head
I accuse directly, but indirectly, you
who now atone perhaps upon this bed
for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew
the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio
and saccharined my death with morning dew.
The speaker, here, is Heaney’s cousin, Colum McCartney – murdered in 1975. It is a strange meeting in which the poet’s turn of phrase is turned on him as he commits – again – the crime for which he’s in the dock. Indeed, threading rhymes and rhythms into a dead voice is questionable, if questioning, business: to puppeteer a self-accusation so artfully might be tactless; to manage their words tactfully, artless. Of course, this is Heaney’s point: the heavy-handed rhyme of ‘fact’/’tact’ tells us so; as does the Purgatorio’s evasive invocation; and the language ‘saccharined’ to death can’t help but leave a bitter taste. This is to say: a poem’s subject is always ethically fraught because it gets little to say about what it is subjected to, and speaking of someone is always also speaking for them. Through this figure, this shade, this Colum, Heaney can explore the alienation true self recognition requires.
Whether the poem attains absolution or remains a body-swerve – if the form can stand the content – is decidedly unresolved. Although, it is unfortunate that, after all this, ‘Station Island’ ends with James Joyce’s apparition telling the poet that he’s doing a bang-up job, actually, and not to heed the naysayers: ‘You lose more of yourself than you redeem / doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.’ The first sentence has the disappointing air of stock quotation, which is rarely the decent thing, and here it seems the poem slightly loses track of its own redemption arc. Indeed, one wonders if, for all that pilgrimage, we’ve simply gone in circles.
Of course, these are important questions with which to struggle, and it is a shame that so often Heaney’s poems are reduced to illustration and quotation, otherwise anthologised, decontextualised – a process by which their anxious aporia is dispelled. Heaney even had to consider and pre-empt this eventuality in every word he spoke, writing to Ted Hughes on the death of Philip Larkin: ‘Somehow, the knowledge that what you say is already a “quote” gags you at the original point.’ The pressure to speak can leave one struggling for breath. It is an exacting and exacted existence, but one, it must be said, that comes with certain benefits. Both the Poems and Letters, in different registers, show a private poet courting lyric publicity and cultivating a voice of guarded ambiguity: memorable, yes, but sacrificing true risk for renown. The introduction to the Poems returns us to one of Heaney’s oft-quoted desires, which tells us much: ‘Fundamentally, what I want from poetry is the preciousness and foundedness of wise feeling become eternally posthumous in perfect cadence’. Such a claim, though humbly uttered, would make Oderisi wince: neither the eternal nor the perfect belong on earth. Undoubtedly, Heaney’s cadence breathes still through the Faber list, and mainstream publishing writ large; it sells books, but we pay a price when poetic discourse equals just the quotable phrase. Real feeling resists received wisdom, however well tuned: it makes us read without agreeing, allows new thinking to take shape and destroys our preciousness.
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Photo by Micheline PELLETIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
Jack Barron teaches English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His writing, creative and critical, has appeared in Literary Review, Shearsman Magazine, PN Review, New Left Review, CounterText and elsewhere.
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