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Seamus Heaney

1939–2013

 

Seamus Justin Heaney, who became in 1995 the fourth Irish person to win the Nobel Prize for literature, was born in County Derry on 13th April 1939, the eldest son of a small farmer, Patrick Heaney, and his wife Margaret.  It was the family's farm, 'Mossbawn' at Bellaghy, and the rural way of life around it, that have provided the constant background, the source and sounding board of Heaney's poetry.  Despite Heaney's later changes of habitation and the enlargement of his frame of reference, that early home was where the real world would remain.

      Having attended a local mixed school, Heaney was educated, benefiting from the Northern Ireland Education Act of 1947 (an extension to Ulster of R.A. Butler's landmark act of 1944), at St Columb's College in Londonderry (or what Heaney's Catholic community always called Derry).  He was among the first generation of Ulster's disadvantaged Catholics to be able to avail themselves of a university education.  In Northern Ireland, under British rule, he had advantages unknown to those living in Southern Ireland.  It was this educational and social revolution that brought about the resurgence of political and literary activity in Northern Ireland, beginning in the sixties, when the children who had benefited from the Act came of age, with new demands to be heard.

      At Queen's University in Belfast, to which he won a bursary in 1956, he took first-class honours in 1961.  He worked first as a teacher in St Thomas' Secondary School in Belfast during 1962-63, before going on to teach at St Joseph's College of Education, and then at Queen's itself.  In 1965 he married Marie Devlin, by whom he has two sons and a daughter.  Marie Heaney is herself an accomplished author.

      At school he had got to know Seamus Deane, the poet and writer.  Later at St Joseph's he would meet Michael McLaverty, a Catholic novelist or quietist tendencies.  However, the greatest literary influences came at university, among other young poets of his own age group, who were greatly influenced by the visiting English poet Philip Hobsbaum.  The discovery at the same time of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, so rooted in the fields of Monaghan, and the work of a younger generation of British poets, would affect Heaney's own outlook and writing.  The ancient rituals of rural life combined with the technical efficiency of the polished modern lyric to create his own particular poetry.

      His first poems appeared in fugitive publications, but the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1966 seemed to many to mark the emergence of a major talent, a successor to Yeats.  He compared the work of his father in cultivating the soil and reaping his harvests, to his own work, cultivating expression in a smaller harvest of poems.  The book was a great popular success, especially in Ireland.  This, it must be emphasised, was a remarkable achievement.

      In 1969, the year in which he published the ominously entitled collected Door into the Dark, the present troubles began in Ulster.  In 1972 he gave up teaching to freelance, and emigrated from Ulster with his family to the south of Ireland to live in a cottage in rural Wicklow.  This period in the real literary world, so to speak, did not last long, however, and by 1975 he was back teaching, taking a job at Carysfort Teacher Training College in Blackrock, outside Dublin, where he stayed until 1981 as a head of department.  The family moved to a house facing the sea in Sandymount, where he still lives.  Since then his teaching appointments have been largely temporary visiting ones of distinction at colleges in the USA, Ireland and Britain.  Again this dependency of the modern poet on the world of academia, in contrast to the careers of Kavanagh and Clarke, was very much in the modern Anglo-American mode.

      Heaney had perhaps a distinct advantage for an Irish poet in that his work was published in Britain by Faber and Faber, a firm which had developed a major modern poetry list under T.S. Eliot since the 1920s.  From the start of his career his work had its place in a ready-made establishment as a Faber poet.  Some of his contemporaries, who chose to publish in Ireland for various reasons, were not so lucky in reaching a wider international audience so readily.

      Many of the important themes of his work were established in that first collection, though others, such as a fascination with the language and mythology of Northern Europe (especially the bog bodies of Denmark) developed later.  'The North' was a culture, a state of mind to be contrasted with the civilization of 'the South', not only of Dublin, but eventually of the Italy of Dante.

      He also had a distinct talent as a prose writer, largely as a critic.  He was elected to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford for the years 1989-94.  A member of the Irish Academy of Letters (a largely moribund organization founded by Yeats), Heaney has developed into a major figure in world literature, well worthy, many thought, of his eventual Nobel Prize.  (Though for others a prize which was withheld from the writers Joyce and Graham Greene, cannot be said to be fully worthy of the status accorded it by the world's press, more concerned with the value of the prize than the quality of the authors it is given to.)

      His poetry reflects a modern temperament, much influenced by currents of modern Anglo-American poetry, in which can still be detected echoes of the older languages of Ireland, not only Gaelic, of course, but also the particular speech patterns of his own place, over the small fields of which several cultures in history have contended for mastery.

      However, the recent experience of Ulster, which he occasionally draws upon, is not to be equated with the modern experience of Ireland as a whole.  Also these rural and archaeological themes contrast strangely with the life of most modern Irish people, which is largely urbanized and heavily affected by the grosser forms of modern Anglo-American culture and lifestyle.  Like so many Irish poets, he cultivates what Frank O'Connor once called 'the backward look', peculiar to Irish literature.  What may be the basic appeal of his poetry, in contrast, say, to the modern school of Dublin urban novelists such as Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle, is a harking back to the sentiments of the soil and of history.  This may be seen by later generations as a dangerously sentimental and limited view of what the Irish experience in his time has been.

      Nevertheless, despite these few critics, perhaps inevitable in the smaller world of Irish literature (as Yeats said 'great hatred, little room, maimed us from the start'), he has undoubtedly brought poetry into the lives of many.  With Ted Hughes, another Faber poet, he edited two vital and enthusiastic anthologies of poetry for children, which have transformed its teaching for many.

      Compared with his Irish peers and contemporaries, such as Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, and John Montague, whose poetry speaks with a clarity of language and image, Heaney's more allusive and elliptical lyrics are also elusive.  The influence of Patrick Kavanagh is perhaps stronger, the same longing of an urbanized man for the muddy puddles of his childhood; but what was also puzzling for many readers was his careful avoidance of plain statement.

      The appearance in 1999 of a new version of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, saw the continuance of Heaney's fascination with the theme of northern life in Europe, as well as his attempt to bring his own Irish perspective to bear on the traditions that underlie the wider culture of the British Isles.  It enlarged the context in which the struggle against those other monsters of the outer darkness in his native Ulster have to be seen, by providing an Irish poet's novel interpretation of the idea of the 'Anglo-Saxon' which lies at the heart of Britain's identity.

      Of all the many poets writing in Ireland, Heaney's work almost alone has won a universal audience.  Whatever may be the countercurrent of local opinion about Heaney, for a wider world he has become the voice of Irish poetry and so exerts an extraordinary influence on literary ideas of modern Ireland.