Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney: Poetry Against the Northern Silence

Minutes before he died at Blackrock Clinic in Dublin on 30 August 2013, Seamus Heaney sent his wife Marie a text message consisting of two Latin words: *Noli timere*. Be not afraid. They were the last words written by a poet whom Robert Lowell had called the most important Irish poet since Yeats, and whom *The Independent* would describe the following morning as probably the best-known poet in the world. For a farmer's son from County Londonderry, it was an improbable ending, and entirely characteristic in its compression.

Mossbawn

Heaney was the first of nine children, born on 13 April 1939 at Mossbawn, the family farmhouse in Tamniaran near Castledawson, County Londonderry. His father Patrick was a farmer and cattle dealer; his mother, Margaret Kathleen McCann, came from a family with relatives working the linen mills. Heaney himself named the fault line this created, describing the "inner tension between the rural Gaelic past exemplified by his father and the industrialized Ulster exemplified by his mother." Soil against machinery, Gaelic against industrial Ulster: that tension is the engine of nearly everything he wrote.

He attended Anahorish Primary School and at twelve won a scholarship to St Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry. The move from farmhouse to boarding school was the first of the departures his poetry would keep re-staging. In 1953 his young brother Christopher died, a loss he returned to in "Mid-Term Break," now among the most widely taught poems in English, and again decades later in "The Blackbird of Glanmore."

The Matter of His Own Life

At Queen's University Belfast, where he read English Language and Literature from 1957 and graduated in 1961 with First Class Honours, Heaney found a copy of Ted Hughes's *Lupercal*. The effect was a permission slip. "Suddenly," he said, "the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life." He took teacher certification at St Joseph's Teacher Training College and began teaching at St Thomas' Secondary School in Ballymurphy, Belfast, where the headmaster Michael McLaverty put Patrick Kavanagh's poems into his hands and mentored him toward publication. The first poems appeared in 1962. That same year, at St Joseph's, he met Marie Devlin, a schoolteacher and writer; they married in August 1965 and had three children, Michael, Christopher and Catherine Ann.

*Death of a Naturalist* followed in 1966, opening with "Digging," in which the poet weighs a pen against his father's spade and decides the pen will have to do the work. Lecturing posts came quickly: St Joseph's College in 1963, then Modern English Literature at Queen's from 1966.

The Bog and the Troubles

*Door into the Dark* (1969), *Wintering Out* (1972) and *North* (1975) arrived as Northern Ireland tore itself apart, and they made Heaney's most contested move. In "Bogland," "Bog Queen" and their companions, the Iron Age bodies preserved in Ulster peat become his figures for sectarian killing: ritual murder recovered intact, thousands of years late, indicting the present by refusing to decay. Not everyone accepted the equation. The poet and critic Ciaran Carson charged that Heaney had become "the laureate of violence — a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing," a line that has shadowed the bog poems ever since. The Swedish Academy would later observe that Heaney was simultaneously drawn to and critical of the "northern reticence" that *North* anatomises.

His politics were unmistakable but rarely declarative. "Requiem for the Croppies" gave voice to the Irish rebels of 1798. When an anthology of British poetry claimed him, he replied in verse with *An Open Letter*: "My passport's green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen." He turned down the British poet laureateship on the same grounds.

Away from the North

A visiting professorship at Berkeley in 1970–71 broke the Belfast pattern; by 1976 he was Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin. The books that followed widened steadily: *Field Work* (1979), *Station Island* (1984), *The Haw Lantern* (1987), *Seeing Things* (1991). The Academy singled out the "Squarings" sequence in *Seeing Things*, where twelve-line units hold a restraint that matches the content only on the surface. Later collections — *The Spirit Level* (1996), *Electric Light* (2001), *District and Circle* (2006), *Human Chain* (2010) — kept winning major prizes, the T. S. Eliot for *District and Circle*, the Forward for *Human Chain*.

From lecterns he argued for what poetry was for. He was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard from 1985 to 1997, then Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence until 2006, and Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1989 to 1994. Out of that work came the essay collections *The Government of the Tongue* (1988) and *The Place of Writing* (1989), examining the role of poetry and of the poet, and holding that poetry's essential task is the survival of beauty, especially where tyrannical regimes threaten to destroy it. "When a poem rhymes," he wrote, "when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life."

The Translator

Heaney's second career was raising the dead. *Sweeney Astray* (1984) brought over the Irish *Buile Suibhne*; *The Cure at Troy* (1990) reworked Sophocles' *Philoctetes* and *The Burial at Thebes* (2004) his *Antigone*; *Laments* (1995), made with Stanisław Barańczak, carried the Polish Renaissance elegies of Jan Kochanowski into English. *Beowulf: A New Verse Translation* (1999) took the Whitbread Book of the Year and became the version a generation of students actually read. His translation of Book VI of the *Aeneid*, Aeneas among the dead, was published posthumously in 2016.

The Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1995, for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Why Seamus Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is not intellectual system-building. Heaney produced no philosophy, invented no form, founded no movement. What he had was an ear of freakish accuracy and a talent for making a single physical noun carry historical weight without visible strain — squelch, spade, peat, blackberry — so that a poem about a farmyard turns out to be a poem about inheritance, colonisation and guilt, and never announces the transition. Robert Pinsky located it precisely: "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Lowell called him the most important Irish poet since Yeats; the academic John Sutherland called him "the greatest poet of our age"; the Swedish Academy praised the integration of "history and sensuality, myths and the day-to-day." These are the terms his admirers actually reach for — supremacy and gift — rather than genius in the sense of raw cognitive power, and the distinction is worth keeping.

The counter-case is real and comes from inside Irish letters. Carson's accusation that the bog poems mythologise murder — that beautiful language applied to sectarian corpses risks aestheticising them — has never been fully answered, and Heaney's characteristic refusal to make direct political statements struck some contemporaries as evasion dressed as tact. His reputation also benefited enormously from the Anglo-American academy and the Nobel machinery; a poet less institutionally placed writing the same poems would not be as read. What survives that scrutiny is the craft itself, which is unarguable: nobody has to be told a Heaney line is good.

Legacy

He died on 30 August 2013 at seventy-four, following a fall outside a restaurant. He was buried at St Mary's Church in Bellaghy under a headstone bearing a line from his own poem "The Gravel Walks": "Walk on air against your better judgement." His papers are held at the National Library of Ireland, and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry continues at Queen's University Belfast, where a boy from Mossbawn once read *Lupercal* and understood what he was allowed to write about.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1995
• Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize — 1968
• Irish PEN Award — 2005
• T. S. Eliot Prize — 2006
• Notable work: Death of a Naturalist
• Notable work: District and Circle
• Notable work: Human Chain
• Genres: poetry