Seamus Heaney was a self-conscious self-made poet. In his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, he provides the best description of ‘finding your voice’ as a writer. Hearing his mother narrate the Latin grammar of her school days gave him the initial impetus for poetry; The BBC Shipping Forecast’s ‘beautiful undulating rhythm’ and the Catholic homily’s ‘Prayer to the Blessed Virgin which was part of the applied rhyme’. He learned to express inspired emotions through reading English poetry at school, and particularly through the ‘heavily accented consonant noises’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in whose ‘staccato’ music Heaney heard an encouraging echo of his own ‘energetic, angular’ Ulster accent.
This sage essay was delivered as a lecture to the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, less than a decade after Heaney wrote the first work that established his reputation, death of a naturalist (1966) Although the early student poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertas’, there was no long struggle for maturity and recognition: Heaney was fully aware of what he wanted, with a product whose quality was evident straight out of the box. As Christopher Ricks astutely put it in a contemporary review, ‘You constantly find yourself wishing to impose on the poems their own best formulations.’ Rix gives the example of the ‘cold hardness in our hands’ of a dug-up potato, from the poem ‘Digging’. ‘It’s what we like in words,’ he reflects.
death of a naturalist The poet ends by remembering how, as a child, he loved peering into wells, but now ‘I rhyme/To see myself, to echo the darkness’. It was the skillful inclusion of a kind of director’s commentary in his twelve collections that helped readers invest in Heaney’s journey, from his childhood in the 1940s to his Nobel Prize in 1995. His last book, human chainNearly sixty thousand copies were sold in the UK and Ireland between publication in 2010 and his death in 2013 – an enormous number for a living poet – and many more thereafter.
enjoy the poems of seamus heaney – which, at nearly 1,300 pages, sits hand in hand with a quiet rigor of its own – containing dozens of those books in one place, as well as all the uncollected poems, as well as over five hundred pages of notes. We can now follow Hopkins into his first imitation, ‘Insertus’, where the tuning-fork beauty of Heaney’s sense of the world around him becomes immediately apparent (‘Quietly/And stilled/Lay the field…/Pushed/And pulled/The steel rope came’). Like many young poets, he drinks too much Dylan Thomas homebrew (‘Hill-happy and wine-wonderful’) for a short period of time, but the agricultural realism that will become his signature manner is already spicing things up (he borrows Ted Hughes’s ‘sharp hot stink’ of a fox for a farmer’s ‘sharp porter stink’).
Guinness).
death of a naturalist This was the only book that Heaney significantly trimmed when revising it later in life, and it is striking that in the uncollected poems that followed, his style and imagery have already settled into familiar grooves. So, we first get the ‘guttural chat’ of the boats and the ‘guttural paddle’ of the boat. winter season (1972), we get ‘The Tawny Gutter Water’. This is not a story of poetic mistakes, but of perfectionism: how to best apply the right word to the right thing. Heaney described poetic technique as a proprietary matter, ‘the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought’. But the risk of uniqueness is self-parody, as he also knew, though he did not always avoid it (in one of the twenty-five unpublished poems at the end of the book, he sarcastically admits: ‘I keep telling about that hardware store’).
However, Heaney mitigated his repetition by infusing each collection with something new. Answer (1975) was the book in which he most boldly addressed the history of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. is less famous station ofA pamphlet of prose poems was published in Belfast in the same year, and reprinted here in full for the first time in half a century. Here, Heaney engages childhood memories of communalism with more rawness than before, even if the sentence rhythm is still something like poetry. (‘The air grew dark, cloud-barred, a butcher’s apron’ is an iambic pentameter that combines Keatsian pastoral with Irish republican slang for the red, white and blue of the Union Jack.) Then there was the long Dantean title poem. station island (1984), at the end of which James Joyce’s ghost tells the Pilgrim poet ‘Don’t be so serious’, advice he took to heart in later books, such as soul level (1996) – that hardware store, again – that valued the spiritual brilliance of sight and voice.
For me, Heaney’s unmistakable brilliance as a lyricist means he rarely notices the inspired strangeness that distinguishes the canonical poets his canonizers often cite, like Wordsworth and Eliot. However, by the same token, he never wrote as boringly as those great men did in later life. It’s a rare collected poem of this size – almost 700 pages of poems – that you can open almost anywhere with the expectation of something good.
Unfortunately, the extensive editorial affair, which in its scale is reminiscent of Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue’s extensive interpretation Poems by TS Eliot (2015), have not been subjected to the same quality control. The love was apparently exchanged between three Heaney experts – Rosie Lavan, a poetry scholar; Bernard O’Donoghue, an Irish poet and academic; and Matthew Hollis, former Faber poetry editor – it’s hit and miss in its illumination and accuracy. The summaries of the publication and reception of each Faber collection are welcome and enrich dense critical biographies with detail. But although it is interesting to note that ‘The Early Purges’, about a farm laborer drowning kittens, attracted complaints when set for O Levels in 1976, it appears that the story was not fact-checked: the poem was not condemned by any Tory MP in the House of Commons, or condemned in any ‘anonymous letter’. daily telegraphBut in a news report in that newspaper.
Meanwhile, the verse-by-verse commentary, when moved beyond helpful terminology, can be an interesting mix of the obvious and the off-beam. For example, ‘Digging’ famously compares the poet’s pen to both a hoe and a gun (‘martial imagery’, say the editors). But it seems strange to explain that the ‘latent subtext’ of the poem (on the contrary Express Subtext?) There is the saying ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ and it is not mentioned that in his 1974 lecture Heaney said that he was thinking of the country people who would cheerfully say to him on the way home from school, ‘The pen is lighter than the spade’. Similarly, to claim that the ‘meaning’ of the last line, ‘I’ll dig with it’, requires the emphasis on ‘it’ that occurs in some Northern Irish accents’ at first seems to be a very Hennessey point about regional nuances. But there are recordings of a few minutes on YouTube where the poet himself emphasizes both ‘I’ and ‘I will dig’. After all, the poetic voice cannot be watermarked with such precision.