Seamus Heaney 1939-2013
An appreciation by Tom Mooney
Admirers meeting Samuel Beckett for the first time were prudently warned not to treat him as a great man: the first Irish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature since Beckett, Seamus Heaney was also a literary luminary who preferred the common touch.
Heaney remained a gregarious poet in the hothouse of mainstream poetry, one who was keen to support the international fellowship of poetry, but not slow to support burgeoning literary festivals, such as the Wexford Book Festival, which he attended in 2006, and the more established, the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo.
For as long as I have been attending the international poetry festival in the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire, Heaney was a ubiquitous presence: in 2002 he read to a full house from his volume Electric Light, alongside Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham: in 2005 he was a discreet figure in the half-full auditorium to witness Faber and Faber’s latest Northern Ireland prodigy, Nick Laird, give his first reading in public in Ireland and his first in front of his parents; two years later the roles were reversed as Laird sat in the audience to observe Heaney give a generous introduction to Denis O’Driscoll and James Fenton. Heaney was there too in recent years to listen to readings by Robert Pinsky, Derek Mahon and the man most likely to succeed him as Ireland’s greatest living poet, Paul Muldoon.
Heaney gave a memorable reading In Wexford In 2006, organised by the late Emer Lovett, after the publication of District and Circle, poems that assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory.
If Heaney had never published a word of poetry, he would still rank as one of the great critical voices of our time. In the field of the scrutiny and analysis of poetry, Heaney was the alpha critic among twentieth century Irish writers: his scope and vision have only been matched by a handful on the international stage, including his friend, Ted Hughes, to whom Beowulf was dedicated.
Heaney was a much sought after critic, and his essays were eagerly absorbed because of the fresh breadth of his vision, and the invaluable insight he brought to poets too often the victims of neglect or fashion, such as Edmund Muir and Padraic Fallon.
Among his multifaceted talents as a critic, it was his acute summation of a fellow traveller’s vision and his ear for style that made it a rewarding pleasure to spend time in the company of Heaney.
He wrote that Yeats’ capacity to rekindle the flame of his inspiration throughout a half century of writing poems was ‘a triumphant fulfillment of his own prophetic belief in the mind’s indomitable resource.’
Describing the work of a young Wordsworth, he noted that ‘the poet’s note is sure, the desire to impress absent, and the poems thoroughly absorbed in their own unglamorous necessities.’
Delivering his Nobel Lecture in December 1995, Heaney said we require a poem to be not only pleasurably right, but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
To begin at the beginning, Heaney was born in Castledawson, Derry in 1939, the same year that Yeats died and the same year Patrick Kavanagh, (a writer who would be a stepping stone in the development of Heaney in the 1960s because his poetry brought him back to where he came from, ‘small farm life’), arrived in Dublin from Monaghan.
The ‘animal life’ of the eldest of nine in Mossbawn, where his father Patrick farmed fifty acres, surfaces in his first volume, Death of A Naturalist, written between the age of twenty three and twenty six, thirty four compact poems which mirror the tension between speech and silence inherited from his parents and which, to an Irish reader, is imitative of, but not derivative, of Kavanagh. Death of a Naturalist takes the new world of Ted Hughes’ Hawk In the Rain one step further.
After Hughes completes the famous couplet:
‘There is no sophistry in my body.
My manners are tearing off heads’ from Hawk Roosting in 1957, just less than a decade before the publication of Death of a Naturalist, modern poetry was jolted almost overnight, and when Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley are ruminating their first poems under the watchful but encouraging eye of Philip Hobsbaum in Belfast in 1964, Hughes had upped his game with The Thought Fox and his second volume Lupercal: the tremors from his smithy in Yorkshire and later Devon, had been acutely felt In Northern Ireland.
Hughes – nine years Heaney’s senior – seemed to come from another planet, and once The Thought Fox imagined the poet’s inspiration as a feral predator, it cleared the path for Death of a Naturalist, and for the stark, no nonsense, unromantic and colloquial evocations of a rural life as reflected in the first stanza of Heaney’s The Early Purges.
‘I was six when I first saw kittens drown,
Dan Taggart pitched them, the scraggy wee shits,
Into a bucket, a frail metal sound.’
Hughes, in View of a Pig, had earlier described its death squeal as ‘the rending of metal.’
Heaney, paraphrasing Anna Swir when he said new poems need a biological right to life, spent his career being unafraid of being unrooted, and his work was the richer for it. Heaney, unlike Hughes, was able to disengage from each new collection, avoid the trappings of myth, the insane pinioning of celebrity, more astutely than Hughes, and keep moving forward.
At Hughes funeral in November 1998, Heaney said that no death outside his immediate family had left him feeling more bereft, and no death in his lifetime had hurt poets more.
Heaney lived in many places, the North, Wicklow, Dublin, Harvard, departures described as more geographical than psychological. Yet the shift from Mossbawn is a subcutaneous flow in Heaney’s work, in Death of a Naturalist, The Haw Lantern, The Spirit Level and Electric Light.
Even in The Tollund Man in Springtime in District and Circle, the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection.
Heaney’s resolutely stressed and crammed poetic line of his first collections becomes subdued in the 1980s and 1990s by the classic vernacular of the old European and Gaelic heritage.
His wife Marie Heaney (author of Over Nine Waves) and the mother of his three children, has been described as central to the poet’s life, both professionally and imaginatively. She accompanied Heaney when he unveiled a bust to Senator Ted Kennedy in New Ross in June.
Long before Heaney encountered Hughes or Kavanagh, his introduction to poetry as a schoolboy was via the traditional route: Chaucer,Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins and, much later, Wilfred Owen, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and T.S. Eliot. He had first experienced the rhythm of European speech by listening to BBC radio broadcasts during World War II, and said that this became a journey into the wideness of the world.
He had already worked out that poetry should arise from the quotidian patterns of life, that poems are extraordinary moments related more to the unconscious. In a political context, as a Northern Ireland writer and a Catholic, Heaney came to realise that language could be a measure of freedom.
In his introduction to Beowulf, Heaney articulated the challenge of finding the tuning fork that will give a line the note and pitch.
In his year at Queen’s University, Belfast, Heaney, anxious to distance himself from the ‘emblems of adversity’ in the province, was enlightened by the discovery that his language could escape from a partitioned intellect, avoid being an adversarial tongue, and become an entry into further language, a ‘voice eddying with vowels of all rivers.’
(The dichotomy of being an island in a two current stream is addressed in a light vein in Electric Light, where he also recalls childhood visits to an old woman, more than likely his grandmother.)
In The Government of the Tongue, Heaney referred to creative writing as a spurt of abundance from a source within, and not a reactive stimulus in the outside world.
In a wonderful passage of inspired transparency, to rank alongside Rimbaud’s call to arms, Heaney decrees his epitaph for future generations:
The poet is credited with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit.’
Twenty years after Death of a Naturalist, Heaney ended a five -year sabbatical with Station Island, where in Changes he acknowledges the poet’s right or option to flee from their roots, and yet map a return to ‘the covered core of the self.’
It is in the rarefied field of criticism that Heaney continued to astound with his capacious intellect and an endearing and sentient enthusiasm for the work of other poets, albeit of his own generation, though not exclusively.
He studied styles the way a fly fisherman looks at the backcast of another, buoyed by a belief that a poet appeases his original needs by learning to make works that seem to be all his own work.
A remarkable meeting in Dublin in 1988 is recalled by Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets: four of the most famous scribes on the planet, Heaney, Brodsky, Derek Walcott and Les Murray, gathered in a studio in RTE for a round table discussion.
Four supremely gifted writers in English, but not English, in agreement about the integrity of their art, with much in common but also existentially apart in some ways: Heaney was acquainted with Keats To Autum’ at a young age, ‘an ark of the covenant between language and sensation,’ whereas Murray professed that he never read Keats.
Michael Longley has written that if he was to divide the four elements between Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, he would grant Heaney water and earth, and Mahon fire and air.
Heaney himself, in his Nobel lecture, said that as a poet he sought senescence. His last collection, Human Chain, was reviewed by Colm Toibin as his best single volume for many years, and Toibin was pivotal in organising the joint reading between Heaney and, alas, the late Denis O’Driscoll, in Kilkenny two years ago. Both rekindled the chemistry so evident in Stepping Stones. Remembering Heaney in this sad week, we should cherish all the more his best description of poetry, which ‘begins in delight, and ends in self consciousness.’
