On Seamus Heaney

By Roy Foster

A vivid and original account of one of Ireland’s greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer

The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland.

Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney’s work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney’s evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney’s cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers.

Combining a vivid account of Heaney’s life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691211473

Book preview

ON SEAMUS HEANEY

WRITERS ON WRITERS

R. F. Foster On Seamus Heaney

John Burnside On Henry Miller

Michael Wood On Empson

Colm Tóibín On Elizabeth Bishop

Alexander McCall Smith What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

Michael Dirda On Conan Doyle

C. K. Williams On Whitman

Phillip Lopate Notes on Sontag

R. F. FOSTER ON SEAMUS HEANEY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2020 R. F. Foster. Not to be quoted without permission

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [e-mail]

Published by Princeton University Press

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press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

First paperback printing, 2022

Paper ISBN 978-0-691-23404-5

E-book ISBN 978-0-691-21147-3

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Names: Foster, R. F. (Robert Fitzroy), 1949– author.

Title: On Seamus Heaney / R. F. Foster.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2020] | Series: Writers on writers | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020009285 (print) | LCCN 2020009286 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691174372 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780691211473 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Heaney, Seamus, 1939–2013—Criticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC PR6058.E2 Z6597 2020 (print) | LCC PR6058.E2 (ebook) | DDC 821/.914—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009285

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009286

Version 1.1

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Ben Tate and Josh Drake

Text and Jacket Design: Leslie Flis

Production: Jacqueline Poirier

Publicity: Katie Lewis and Jodi Price

Copyeditor: Luane Hutchinson

Cover design by Amanda Weiss

for Jan Dalley

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgementsix

1. Certus 1

2. Kinship30

3. The Same Root60

4. In the Middle of His Journey94

5. Alphabetical Order120

6. The Moment of Mortality148

7. The Bird on the Roof176

8. Clearance198

Brief Reference Notes toOn Seamus Heaney 207

Index215

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This short book arises not only from a deep admiration for Seamus Heaney’s work, but also from a fascination with its unique ability to speak to a wide readership while retaining its own independent mysteries. Sustained immersion in his writing for the past few years may not have supplied all the answers to the question of how he achieved this, but it has brought other pleasures in its wake. I am acutely aware that I am far from possessing Heaney’s gift to ‘glean the unsaid off the palpable’, but working on this book has brought me somewhere closer to the core achievement of a great poet, and made me wish I had known him better in life.

The book is written from the standpoint of a historian and biographer, to whom Heaney’s poetry has spoken in a direct and forceful way since his early books. I remember where I was sitting when I read North in 1975 and felt that authentic sensation of the hairs standing up on my head. Nearly twenty years later, I read ‘At the Wellhead’ in the New Yorker, tore it out, and pinned it to the noticeboard in my Oxford study; slightly yellowed but enduringly magical, it was still there when I moved out after another twenty-odd years. And reading ‘Album’ in his last collection, the attempts to embrace a lost father resonated so profoundly that my eyes filled with tears. I am just one of numerous readers for whom Heaney’s work has provided a series of touchstones throughout life, creating a permanent resource.

It is difficult to write about someone who wrote so well about himself, not to mention leaving behind the treasure trove of interviews in Dennis O’Driscoll’s marvellous Stepping Stones—a kind of transactional autobiography. Nonetheless, I have tried to read the work in the light of the poet’s life and the historical circumstances surrounding it. The result underlines Heaney’s lifelong commitment to artistic integrity. This was sustained in the face of pressures to write for the occasion, particularly the political occasion. He preferred to let a poem ‘find’ him—and its audience. There is also a very strong sense of continuity and inheritance. ‘More than a century before Yeats imposed upon himself the task of hammering his thoughts into a unity’, Heaney wrote, ‘Wordsworth was fulfilling it with deliberate intent. Indeed, it is not until Yeats that we encounter another poet in whom emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, political awareness, artistic self-knowledge and bardic representativeness are so fully and resolutely combined’. Heaney himself might be seen as the next link in this chain, and the connections with Yeats form one of the themes of this book, delicate though Heaney himself was about negotiating them.

I am grateful to Ben Tate of Princeton University Press for suggesting I write it, to my agent Peter Straus for bringing it about, and above all to the Heaney family—Marie, Christopher, Mick, and Catherine—for their friendly encouragement throughout. Much of the thinking and reading behind this book took place during my year as Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge; I am grateful to the Master, Rowan Williams, to the Fellows, and especially to Eamon Duffy, himself a penetrating and close reader of Heaney’s poetry.

This is no more a work of exhaustive literary criticism than it is a comprehensive biography, but in arriving at these reflections, it will be clear what I owe to the work of notable commentators on Heaney such as Neil Corcoran, Rui Carvalho Homem, Bernard O’Donoghue, Michael Parker, Marilynn Richtarik, Richard Rankin Russell, and Helen Vendler, several of whom were kind enough to discuss aspects of his work with me. I am also grateful to Mary Broderick, Eugene Kielt, Blake Morrison and Andrew O’Hagan for generously directing me towards material, and above all to Jan Dalley, Tom Dunne, Aisling Foster, Grey Gowrie, Joe Hassett, Hermione Lee, Christina Mahony, and—again—Catherine Heaney for their close and immensely helpful reading of the manuscript.

The extract from ‘Little Gidding’ on pp. 102–3 is excerpted from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright renewed 1971 by Esmé Valerie Eliot. Published by Faber & Faber and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Reprinted by permission.

Poems by Seamus Heaney are quoted with permission of the Estate of Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to whom I am grateful: excerpts from District and Circle by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney; excerpts from Electric Light by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 2001 by Seamus Heaney; excerpts from Human Chain by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 2010 by Seamus Heaney; excerpts from Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney; excerpts from Poems 1965–1975 by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1980 by Seamus Heaney.

Quotations from private letters appear by permission of the recipient and the Estate of Seamus Heaney. The quotation from his journal on pp. 96–97 appears with permission of the Estate of Seamus Heaney and the National Library of Ireland.

Though much else in this book is rooted in archival sources, the convention of the series in which it appears is not to have footnotes. So although a close record of references has been kept, they do not appear on the page; there is a guide to sources for quotations at the end.

R. F. Foster

January 2020

ON SEAMUS HEANEY

1

Certus

When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘not sure of himself’. Characteristically, this was a subtle irony. While he referred in later years to a ‘residual Incertus’ inside himself, his early prominence was based on a sure-footed sense of his own direction, an energetic ambition, and his own formidable poetic strengths. It was also based on a respect for his readers which won their trust. ‘Poetry’s special status among the literary arts’, he suggested in a celebrated lecture, ‘derives from the audience’s readiness to … credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit’. Like T. S. Eliot, a constant if oblique presence in his writing life, he prized gaining access to ‘the auditory imagination’ and what it opened up: ‘a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the levels of conscious thought and feeling, invigorating every word’. His readers felt they shared in this.

The external signs of Heaney’s inner certainty of direction, coupled with his charisma, style, and accessibility, could arouse resentment among grievance-burdened critics, or poets who met less success than they believed themselves to deserve. He overcame this, and other obstacles, with what has been called his ‘extemporaneous eloquence’ and by determinedly avoiding pretentiousness: he possessed what he called, referring to Robert Lowell, ‘the rooted normality of the major talent’. At the same time, he looked like nobody else, and he sounded like nobody else. A Heaney poem carried its maker’s name on the blade, and often it cut straight to the bone.

Fame came to him young, but when necessary, Heaney practised evasiveness, like the outlaws on the run who regularly inhabit his work, or the mad King Sweeney of Irish legend, condemned to live the life of a migrant bird, whom he chose as an alter ego. This literally came with his territory. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1939, grew up among the nods, winks, and repressions of a deeply divided society, and saw those half-concealed fissures break open into violence. He knew ‘the North’ (as residents of the Irish Republic call the six north-eastern counties), targeted it, eviscerated it, and left it to live in ‘the South’. It gave him the title of his most famous collection, and he showed how ‘it’ could be written about. But the restraint which he generally practised when addressing politics, coupled with the spectacular internationalising and cosmopolitanising of his reputation, raised sensitive questions. If ‘Sweeney’ rhymed significantly with ‘Heaney’, ‘famous’ rhymed too readily with ‘Seamus’.

He was endlessly photographed and painted, but the portrait in oils by Edward McGuire commissioned by the Ulster Museum in 1973 is perhaps the most enduring image: ‘the poet vigilant’, in Heaney’s own description, expressing a ‘gathered-up, pent-up, head-on quality … a keep of tension’. The powerful, handsome head is placed against a densely interwoven thicket of leaves, suggesting the concealed bird-king or the watchful wood-kerne—but also, perhaps, the double-f repeat pattern of a Faber book cover. It is a complex picture of a poet whose complexities stretch far beyond the charm of his early poems—a charm which itself is never simply what it seems.

Seamus Heaney’s background has been immortalised in those poems as well as a large archive of interviews: a small Derry farmhouse, a cattle-dealing father, a much-loved mother and aunt presiding jointly over the domestic world; the routines of beasts, crops, and land; horses and carts, candles and oil lamps, an outdoor privy, mice scrabbling in the thatch above the children’s beds at night, a world already becoming archaic in his youth. (Smart alecks in Dublin used to refer to these poems, and their author, as ‘pre-electric’.) There is a Proustian exactness in his evocation of the texture and detail of his early life, the unerring memory for the illustration on a tin of condiments or the name of an obscure piece of machinery, and he retained a novelist’s perception of circumstance and psychology. He could also mock this aspect of his reputation: on a visit to the ‘Tam O’Shanter Experience’ at Robert Burns’s birthplace, he was teased that there would one day be a ‘Seamus Heaney Experience’ and replied, ‘That’s right. It’ll be a few churns and a confessional box’. Heaney was marked out early by his cleverness (in a family with its fair share of schoolteachers as well as farmers, and giving the traditional Irish priority to a good education). He progressed from the local primary schools, via success in the eleven-plus examination, to life as a boarder in St Columb’s College, Derry. The wrench of leaving home and family at twelve years old in 1951 remained a sharp memory; the poems and autobiographical reminiscences which record it suggest the special position which he held in his family.

‘I began as a poet’, Heaney later remarked, ‘when my roots were crossed with my reading’. At St Columb’s, his classmates included the future politician John Hume and the brilliant Seamus Deane, himself an apprentice poet but better known later as a powerful and excoriating literary critic. From early on, they would try out their poetic efforts on each other. The College’s conventional but thorough education gave a good grounding in Latin, which served Heaney well in later life, but also exposure to the English poetic tradition (discovery of Patrick Kavanagh’s work, which would mean so much to him, came later). The intensive interviews to which Heaney was subjected later in life, particularly those in Dennis O’Driscoll’s indispensable Stepping Stones, supply the framework for his emergence as a poet. ‘Just by answering’, Heaney himself remarked ruefully, ‘you contribute to the creation of a narrative’. Here as elsewhere, he was adept at controlling his fame.

His first poetic passion was Gerard Manley Hopkins, as is evinced in the lush and winsome wordplay of early poems submitted to local magazines during his time at Queen’s University Belfast (1957–61), which rightly remained uncollected. The lushness was eradicated fairly soon, in obedience to his mentor Philip Hobsbaum’s injunction to ‘roughen up’; winsomeness continued to break out now and then. From Queen’s, he proceeded to train as a schoolteacher, and rapidly attracted attention; the Inspector of Schools decided to haul him out of the schools and appoint him Lecturer in English at St Joseph’s College of Education ‘to teach the other teachers how to teach … he’s as good