Seamus Heaney and American Poetry (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature) 3030955672, 9783030955670

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Seamus Heaney and American Poetry Christopher Laverty

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature Series Editor Kelly Matthews Department of English Framingham State University Framingham, MA, USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness. The series aims to analyze literary works and investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American culture have inspired and impacted recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature, which contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14747

Christopher Laverty

Seamus Heaney and American Poetry

Christopher Laverty Queen’s University Belfast Belfast, UK

ISSN 2731-3182     ISSN 2731-3190 (electronic) New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ISBN 978-3-030-95567-0    ISBN 978-3-030-95568-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Cheryl Rinzler / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Fia

Acknowledgements

This study began as a MA dissertation about the influence of Robert Frost on Seamus Heaney, and was completed under the supervision of Professor Philip McGowan at Queen’s University, Belfast. Without Professor McGowan’s guidance and encouragement to develop my work into a doctoral thesis, this project would not have been possible. I would also like to express sincere thanks to my PhD supervisor, Professor Fran Brearton, whose insights and imaginative suggestions were invaluable as the project developed. I would like to acknowledge the Northern Bridge Consortium, who generously funded my doctoral research from 2015–2018. I would like to thank Peter, my partner, for his support as this project took shape. Personal thanks are also owed to Dr Jonathan Ellis, from the University of Sheffield, who provided feedback on portions of this work at PhD level. I first met Dr Ellis when he invited me to present my research at ‘Elizabeth Bishop in Paris’, in June 2018. That conference, organised by Dr Ellis, was a highlight of my PhD experience and exposed me to a world of Elizabeth Bishop scholarship that continues to inform my own research. I would also like to thank Vassar archivist Dean Rogers, who kindly corresponded with me about some of the archive material contained in this study. I would like to express my gratitude to Catherine Heaney, who took the time to read portions of this work and advised me on securing the necessary permissions. I am grateful to the editors of Estudios Irlandeses, where sections from an early draft of Chap. 3 of this study were published. Portions of vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chap. 5 of this study were featured in Twentieth-Century Literature and are republished here by permission of the Publisher, Duke University Press. Chapter 2 of this book is derived in part from an article published in Irish Studies Review, 12 January 2021, Taylor & Francis, available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2021.1872897. I would like to thank Kelly Mathews, the editor of this Palgrave series, for supporting my project through to final publication. I am grateful to The Seamus Heaney Estate, Faber & Faber, and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, LLC, for permission to reproduce extracts from: ‘Clearances’, The Haw Lantern (1987), ‘A Hank of Wool’, ‘Boy Driving his Father to Confession’, and ‘Banks of a Canal’. Wherever else poetry appears in this study, care has been taken to ensure that all quotations fall within the definition of fair use for the purposes of criticism.

Contents

1 Introduction: America and Northern Ireland  1 2 Belfast: Heaney in the 1960s 31 3 California 1970–1971 61 4 Together and Apart: Heaney and Lowell 95 5 The Walk on Air: Heaney and Bishop127 6 American Poetry and Heaney’s Final Works159 7 Conclusion209 Bibliography219 Index233

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Abbreviations

CP DC DD DN EBP EL FK FW GT HC HL N P R RFCP RLCP SI SL SS ST WO

‘Crediting Poetry’ District and Circle Door into the Dark Death of a Naturalist Elizabeth Bishop Poems Electric Light Finders Keepers Field Work Government of the Tongue Human Chain The Haw Lantern North Preoccupations The Redress of Poetry Robert Frost The Collected Poems Robert Lowell Collected Poems Station Island The Spirit Level Stepping Stones Seeing Things Wintering Out

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: America and Northern Ireland

From an early stage of his career, Seamus Heaney was curious about American poetry and the professional opportunities available to him in the United States. In 1995, the year that Heaney won the Nobel Prize for literature, Michael Allen wrote that ‘from his second book to his seventh […] America’s intermittent presence in Heaney’s poetry alongside England and Ireland suggests that the verse is searching out some empathy and support there.’1 At the time of Allen’s comments, Heaney held the position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University, a post he was in from 1984 to 1996 (though he took his first role there in 1979). In 1996, he became Emerson Poet in Residence, a non-teaching position that he held until 2007. Prior to his long relationship with Harvard, Heaney had been a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, 1970–71, where he read and met with contemporary American poets at a time when he himself had only two volumes of poetry published.2 Given this extensive history and Heaney’s enduring popularity there, it is little wonder that his critics frequently speculated—and  Michael Allen, ‘The Parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969–1987’, Michael Allen Close Readings: Essays on Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2015), p.123. The chapter originally appeared as an article in The Southern Review (Summer Issue, 1995). 2  Heaney first visited America in 1969 when he was invited to a reading in Richmond, Virginia; Heaney returned to the University of California as visiting lecturer in 1976. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7_1

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continue to speculate—at what the nature of his relationship with American poetry might be. Heaney was certainly not alone in feeling what has been described as ‘the long, strong gravitational pull of the great American planet’.3 Oscar Wilde famously went to America in 1882 and, like Walt Whitman, embraced the US press culture to promote his image. Yeats, who also admired Whitman, went to America in the winter of 1903–04, and described the US as ‘the best educated country’4 he had seen. In January 1939 (the year Heaney was born) W. H. Auden visited America and eventually became a US citizen in 1946, while John Montague, born in Brooklyn and raised in Ireland, won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1953 to study at Yale. With such precedents in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that several prominent Irish writers were residing in American universities by the end of the twentieth century. Interviewing Heaney in his university rooms in 1997, Henri Cole observed: ‘if you look at a handful of American universities, you find Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Eamon Grennan, Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney.’ This ‘Anglo-American matrix’, as Cole puts it, is more than simply the result of a collective ‘shrug at the English models’,5 in Heaney’s phrase. During the 1990s, Ireland was transforming into a modern, economically powerful European state in what became known as the Celtic Tiger era. Despite its rapid growth and modernisation, to ‘the world’, Matthew Campbell notes, ‘Ireland still had the glamour of its ancient traditions, music and poetry’; Irish writing was ‘widely represented in the bookshops and campuses of the anglophone world, and Irish poetry shared in that world’s appetite for Irish music, cinema and art.’6 The Northern Irish peace process also brought renewed media interest and a sense of optimism to the reporting of affairs on the island. Heaney began to be quoted by President Bill Clinton, who even hung a copy of The Cure at Troy

 Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2011), p.165.  W.  B. Yeats, ‘America and the Arts’, Uncollected Prose by W.  B. Yeats. Vol. II: Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Prose, 1897–1939, edited by John P.  Frayne and Colton Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p.338. 5  Henri Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, Paris Review, 1997, web. 6   Campbell, ‘Ireland in Poetry: 1999, 1949, 1969’, The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.1. 3 4

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(1990) on the wall of his study in the White House.7 More recently, President Joe Biden—who often stresses his Irish heritage—quoted lines from the chorus of The Cure at Troy during his Democratic Party nomination acceptance speech.8 It is not just because of these lines, and not just by American presidents, that Heaney’s work continues to be quoted. It was reported in 2016 that Heaney’s ‘When the Others were Away at Mass’ was voted the Irish nation’s best-loved poem; in 2020, The Irish Times announced that Heaney replaced Yeats as the most quoted Irish poet, helped in part by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who quoted Heaney in a high-­ profile TV address to the nation.9 Heaney’s canonical status, at home and abroad, derives in large part from his enduring popularity in America. It was the US poet Robert Lowell, after all, who first christened Heaney ‘the best Irish poet since W. B. Yeats’,10 a title that stuck to Heaney all the way to his obituaries in 2013. American universities continue to play a considerable role in bolstering Heaney’s academic reputation. At Harvard, where Heaney is remembered as ‘a revered member of the Harvard family’,11 his former rooms in Adams house have been renamed in his honour, with items of furniture chosen by his friend and critic Helen Vendler, while, in 2016, Emory University opened their archive of Heaney papers to the public.12 Heaney’s 1970–71 year at Berkeley still attracts critical attention, due in part to the Bancroft notebook, a notebook of Heaney’s, now archived at the University of California, which contains drafts of poems he composed during his time as visiting lecturer there.13 In Ireland, an exhibit dedicated to Heaney’s work, organised by Geraldine Higgins, of Emory University, was opened in 2018 by President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, with plans to 7  Ibid, p.1 In his Stepping Stones interviews, Heaney recalls Clinton visiting him in hospital after his stroke in 2006. SS, p.462. 8  August 20th, 2020. 9  See Dan Griffin, ‘When All The Others Were Away at Mass tops favourite poem poll’, The Irish Times, March 11, 2015, web; See Elizabeth Birdthistle, ‘Seamus Heaney’s healing words a sound investment’, The Irish Times, September 5, 2020, web. 10  Lowell, ‘Books of the Year’, Observer, 14 December 1975, p.19. Discussed later in text. 11  Quoted in Corydon Ireland, ‘Heaney’s death caught “the heart off guard”’, in Harvard Gazette, August 30, 2013, web. 12  Emory stated these papers represent ‘the largest research holdings of Heaney material in the world’. Quoted in Elaine Justice, ‘Emory opens Seamus Heaney’s papers to the public’, Emory Report, February 29, 2016, web. 13  See Edward O’Shea, ‘Seamus Heaney at Berkeley, 1970–71’, Southern California Quarterly (2016) Vol. 98, No. 2, pp.157–193.

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move the display to the National Library of Ireland. In Heaney’s hometown of Bellaghy, a £4.25  million arts and literary centre named the Seamus Heaney Homeplace was opened in 2016, while events continue to be held in Heaney’s honour around Queen’s University Belfast and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.14 In print, the posthumous publications Aeneid Book VI (2016) and 100 Poems (2018) have ensured Heaney’s presence in the high street book market. With new poems and letters discovered in 2020 and a commissioned biography by Fintan O’Toole in development,15 it seems highly probable that Heaney will become even more institutionalised and taught in the years ahead, and even more part of the fabric of Irish and American culture. Heaney’s transatlantic status seems to emblematise a wider relationship between Irish and American cultures and literary traditions. Indeed, studies on the American associations of the Irish writers Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce have been completed (despite Joyce never visiting America). Unsurprisingly, the multiple connections between Heaney and America have proved to be irresistible and yet curiously challenging subject matter for his critics. From the earliest reviews of his poetry in the 1960s, Heaney has been compared to Robert Frost, while reviewers of Field Work (1979) were quick to note the significance of ‘Elegy’, a poem in tribute to Lowell. Later, several of the prominent book-length Heaney studies published in the 1980s and ‘90s argued that Heaney’s 1970–71 Berkeley residency was a critical period in his development of a political form.16 Henry Hart’s 1992 study, for instance, gives sustained attention to Heaney’s Berkeley residency and the influence of contemporary US poetry on his prose form in Stations (1975). Rachel Buxton has examined the Frost-Heaney relationship in considerable detail in Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (2004) while Michael Cavanagh’s study Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (2009) contains a chapter on Lowell’s influence on Heaney in the 1970s. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews examines Heaney and America in his wide-ranging study of transatlantic poetics, while Rosie Lavan’s study Seamus Heaney and Society (2020) provides an overview of Heaney’s time 14  See Deirdre Falvey, ‘How Seamus Heaney wrote: First look at a new exhibition’, The Irish Times, July 4, 2018, web; ‘Seamus Heaney centre opens in poet’s home village of Bellaghy’, Belfast Telegraph, September 29, 2016, web. 15  See Alison Flood, ‘“Treasure trove” of unseen Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney writing found’, The Guardian, November 14, 2020, web; Martin Doyle, ‘Fintan O’Toole to write Seamus Heaney’s official biography’, The Irish Times, November 14, 2017, web. 16  Relevant criticism discussed in main chapters.

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in Harvard. Most recently, Sarah Bennett and Justin Quinn have written about Heaney’s American connections and the critical lens through which he was viewed in the United States in Seamus Heaney in Context (2021), a volume of critical essays edited by Higgins. The range of these illuminating publications and their different focuses (some emphasise American residencies, others examine American influence) indicates both the value and the difficulty of exploring the topic as one continuous commentary. Though much existing criticism provides an excellent starting point for further study of Heaney and America, some of the earlier research on Heaney’s residencies in the US has created narratives around the topic that have been called into question by more recent commentary. Magdalena Kay offers this critical summary of the landscape: Heaney’s critics insist on the American influence […] with a tenacity that is surprising given the lack of evidence for many such claims. The search for echoes of Gary Snyder and Robert Bly does not yield much fruit; the mention of Louis Simpson in ‘Making Strange’ hardly invites one to an influence study; Heaney’s great admiration for William Carlos Williams is certainly worth mentioning, yet Williams’s short lines sound nothing like Heaney’s drill-like stanzas of the 1970s.17 That these valid comments appear in a study of Heaney’s Eastern European influences further highlights the need for an equivalent study on Heaney in relation to America, one which examines both Heaney’s time there and the US poets that were important to him, from his first encounters with American writing up to his final collection, where they continue to make their presence felt in his poetry. One of Heaney’s most sensitive critics, Neil Corcoran, has recently commented that Heaney’s achievement is remarkable for its continuity rather than any sense of stylistic breakage.18 This is particularly well-evidenced by Heaney’s American influences, who he first read in Belfast in the 1950s and ‘60s, and returned to for strength throughout his entire career, often in response to difficulty.

17  Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for all Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012) p.131. 18  Neil Corcoran, ‘Happening Once Forever: Heaney’s Late Style’, in “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), p.119.

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ii The wider connections between the Irish, British, and American poetic traditions go far beyond what can be examined by this study, yet it is necessary to give some synthesis of the relevant context to understand the manner in which Heaney came to view American poetry as a young writer in Belfast, and to distinguish the kinds of American writing that were attractive to him from those he elided. As Kennedy-Andrews notes, certain caveats should be brought to bear on discussions of this kind, since the very critical frame employed risks undermining the ‘mixed and plural composition’19 of both American and Irish writing. Indeed, Edna Longley defines Northern Irish poetry as a unique phenomenon within the Irish-­ British scene and ‘the product of multi-ethnic fertilisation’, which draws ‘on all the available literary traditions’20 to express its inheritance and complex affiliations. However, it is possible to determine some of the trends in Heaney’s thinking about America and to situate his American influences within the wider picture of transatlantic literary alliances. Quoting Edwin Fussell’s definition of the American poet as ‘a non-­ Englishman (frequently an anti-Englishman) writing in the English language’, Buxton highlights one of the key parallels of Irish and American writing. She argues that, for Heaney, ‘the fact that Frost was not English, and more specifically not writing in Standard English, was a part of his attraction.’21 While the level of independence from the English tradition achieved by American and Irish poetry has been contested (particularly in the anthologies of the mid-twentieth century), the undeniable success of the American writers hoping to ‘decolonize’22 themselves in the nineteenth century have provided useful models for Irish poets, most notably for Yeats. In response to the question ‘What is Anglo-Irish Poetry?’, the Irish poet Seán Lucy answers that it is: 19  Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.5. 20  Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), p.62. 21  Rachel Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.50–51. 22  Declan Kiberd argues: ‘Nineteenth-century American literature was such a clear instance of a decolonizing culture that it would have been amazing if its writers did not exert a tremendous influence on the Irish revival.’ Quoted by Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry, p.19.

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the story of a search: it is part of the quest of the English-speaking Irish for an identity, the reshaping of English to express the Irish experience.23 Reflecting on this definition of Lucy’s, Mark Storey argues that this particular search for an identity ‘characterises the poetry of Ireland since Yeats.’24 Nineteenth century American writers were engaged in a corresponding search; in Walt Whitman’s phrase, they were asking ‘the terrible query: American National Literature—is there distinctively any such thing, or can there ever be?’25 In the writing of Henry David Thoreau and Whitman, Yeats saw an example of how a ‘reshaping’ of English could be begun and how writers could build a foundation on which a national literature might flourish.26 However, Yeats’s approval of American literature was seldom unequivocal. In Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self (1983), Terence Diggory argues that American poets ‘had succeeded in declaring aesthetic independence from England’ and that, initially, ‘Yeats wanted the Irish to follow the American lead’.27 In the 1905 article ‘America and the Arts’ Yeats does compare the US favourably to England, commenting that ‘the lack of a hereditary order has brought fire and vigour’,28 but he adds that ‘[e]verything had been a delight […] except American poetry’, which, he laments, has followed the ‘modern way of [James Russell] Lowell’ rather than ‘that ancient way Whitman, Thoreau and Poe had lit upon.’29 Diggory claims that, in Yeats’s view, this ‘ancient way’ involved the celebration of nature and turning the self into a subject for poetry. These features come together dramatically in ‘Song of Myself’, the poem where Whitman—the American poet most important to Yeats—boldly elevates his biography into the story of the nation and sounds his ‘barbaric

23  Seán Lucy, ‘What is Anglo-Irish Poetry?’, Irish Poets in English, edited by Seán Lucy (Cork: Mercier Press, 1973), p.15. 24  Storey, Poetry and Ireland Since 1800: A Source Book, edited by Mark Storey (London: Routledge, 1988), p.5. 25  Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), p.490. 26  Terence Diggory notes ‘Yeats acknowledged that “Innisfree” was written particularly with Thoreau in mind” and quotes Yeats expressing his desire to live ‘in imitation of Thoreau.’ Yeats & American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), p.17. 27  Ibid., p.4. 28  Yeats, ‘America and the Arts’, p.340. 29  Ibid., p.339.

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yawp over the roofs of the world’.30 Whatever his disagreements with certain poets, it is clear from Yeats’s key role in the Celtic Revival that he shared significant values with nineteenth century American writers and identified with their determination to formulate a distinct literary identity. It is easy to imagine Yeats’s statement ‘[t]here is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature’31 resonating with Whitman, who in a similar vein remarked ‘[t]o have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.’32 Yeats’s opinion of Whitman’s example, however, became less favourable over time. In the preface to a 1937 edition of poems Yeats writes: I thought when I was young—Walt Whitman had something to do with it—that the poet, painter, and musician should do nothing but express themselves. When the laboritories, pulpits, and newspapers had imposed themselves in the place of tradition the thought was our protection.33 Though this does not represent a total rejection of Whitman (pace Diggory), it is difficult not to read these terms (‘do nothing but express themselves’) as a criticism of the overflow effect of Whitman’s free verse. Yeats’s objection to this characteristic of Whitman’s achievement is germinal in a comment he makes about Emerson in the earlier article ‘America and the Arts’, where he describes Emerson as being ‘of a lesser order’ because ‘he loved the formless infinite too well to delight in form’.34 Emerson’s conceptions of form are best illustrated by remarks made in ‘The Poet’ where he argues that America is too various and expansive to be treated in standard forms (‘it will not wait long for metres’), and that ‘Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of English poets’ lacks any example of a poet who contains ‘that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek’.35 Whitman echoed this statement in his prose, contending that ‘the spirit of English literature is not great, at least is not 30  Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, Leaves of Grass, edited with an introduction by Jerome Loving (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.78. 31  Yeats, ‘Browning’, Letter to the New Island, edited by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p.30. 32  Whitman, Complete Prose Works, p.324. 33  Yeats, Essays and Introductions (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1961), p.x. 34  Yeats, ‘America and the Arts’, p.341. 35  Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume B. 1820–1865, edited by Nina Baym (New York: W.W.  Norton, 2007), p.1193.

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greatest—and its products are no models for us.’36 Whitman goes further than Emerson in his criticisms of English writing, describing it as ‘sluggish and stately’ and impeded by the ‘dread of saying or doing something not at all improper in itself, but unconventional’.37 In Whitman and Emerson’s view, American writing needed to be new and tailored to the unique American experience. In Ireland, no American-scale break with traditional forms occurred; rather, Irish poetry is noted for its tight lyric structures. A difference in stance toward the act of poetic making is detectable in Yeats and Whitman’s advice to younger poets in verse: in ‘Poets to Come’ Whitman pledges he is ‘Leaving it to’ the next generation ‘to prove and define’ the ‘main things’38 for themselves, whereas Yeats tells Irish poets to learn their ‘trade and sing whatever is well-made’.39 This emphasis on the well-wrought poem has persisted in Irish poetry in both the North and South. Indeed, Heaney recalls that he, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon were once referred to as the ‘tight-arsed trio’40 for their formal compression. While all three draw on many influences, their shared preference for lyric concentration over expansiveness is representative of the broader trend noted by Campbell, who observes that ‘[o]nly a small number of Irish poets have followed Kinsella into open form’.41 In contrast to the Emersonian notions of bespoke forms able to capture America’s vastness, in Campbell’s view Irish poets desired to ‘create a place in which the imagination may suggest alternatives to the broken object of a society always keenly aware of local trauma’.42 These diverging approaches to form in Northern Ireland and America are remarkably well-compressed in Heaney’s ‘Bogland’, where he uses a series of quatrains to oppose flat American landscapes with the narrower Irish ‘horizon’, and contrasts America’s westerly movement with Ireland’s  Whitman, Complete Prose Works, p.325.  Ibid. 38  Whitman, ‘Poets to Come’, Leaves of Grass, p.18. 39  ‘Under Ben Bulben’, W.  B. Yeats Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Webb (London: Penguin, 1991), p.211. 40  Frank Kinahan, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, Spring, 1982, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1982), p.408; the phrase originates from Michael Foley, ‘Review of Energy to Burn by James Simmons’, Honest Ulsterman 29, 1971, pp. 40–41. 41  Campbell, ‘Figuring Irish Poetry’, Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Denis Donoghue, edited by Brian G.  Caraher and Robert Mahony (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), p.120. 42  Ibid. 36 37

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‘pioneers’ who strike ‘Inwards and downwards’43 into a national psyche represented by the bog itself. Written before Heaney’s first professional appointment in America and collected in what was only his second book of poems, ‘Bogland’ shows a sophisticated engagement with American literature and Heaney’s awareness of the fact that often, in Van Wyck Brooks’s phrase, American texts operate as ‘a sublimation of the frontier spirit’.44 More significantly, however, in its preference for the tighter structure, ‘Bogland’ suggests that, from an early stage of his career, Heaney shared Yeats’s ambivalence for what the latter calls the ‘formless’45 streak of much US poetry.

iii Heaney’s self-commentary concerning his experiences in America has, without question, over-influenced much critical discussion. However, remarks made during a 1988 interview with Randy Brandes about contemporary American poetry are particularly candid and pertinent. There, Heaney describes reading Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’, an influential essay collected in Carlos Williams’s autobiography, as the experience of seeing what he ‘ought to feel’ without being able to feel it; he explains what he wants is ‘perfect cadence’, not just ‘expectoration or self-regard or a semaphore for self’s sake.’ Pushed on this subject by Brandes, Heaney explains that he finds the American ear ‘fluid and spread’, whereas he admires poetry that ‘contains and practices force within a confined area.’46 Heaney replies to Brandes’s comment, ‘[a] lot of what you’re describing is the Whitmanian inheritance’, that American poetry is in ‘danger’ of ‘using the robust Whitmanian uplift as a roller-coaster’, adding ‘I am suspicious, I suppose, of the large gestures which are expected of American poets.’47 These same feelings are at work in ‘Bogland’, where American vastness is set in contrast to an Irish experience, which, for Heaney, is one of inwardness and of recovering history rather than boldly making it, as Whitman and Emerson aim to do in the American context.  DD, p.55.  Quoted in Richard Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1990), p.8. 45  Yeats, ‘America and the Arts’, p.341. 46  Randy Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, No. 80, 1988, p.17. 47  Ibid., p.18. 43 44

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For the first set of critics who argued for the significance of America to Heaney’s verse, these interview comments may have appeared like a trapdoor to be avoided. This may be why much commentary has overemphasised the influence of more experimental (and therefore arguably more ‘American’) poets Gary Snyder and Robert Bly to Heaney, as if to doubt their importance would somehow be to question the wider argument for American poetry’s significance. But Heaney’s statement of ambivalence actually serves as a convenient starting point for a study of his poetry in relation to America, because his interview comments neatly encapsulate the major fault line running beneath all his experiences of contemporary US poetry in different phases while he was residing there, where his preference for poems that ‘practice force within a confined area’48 actually grew, and where his desire to strip ‘layer after layer’49 of history took on new manifestations. Ironically, much of Heaney’s sense of form is derived from the American writers he read in the 1960s, particularly Frost, whose description of the poem as a ‘stay against confusion’50 became a key aesthetic principle. Though Heaney’s American exemplars, considered in the chapters that follow, may be fewer in number and less diverse than some earlier critics have suggested, the intensity of their influence is substantially greater than existing criticism has recognised. And while it is impossible to determine the true extent to which Heaney’s American influences contributed to his positive reception there, through sustained analysis of his work a clear picture emerges: American poets were central to the formation of Heaney’s poetics in the 1960s and helped him consolidate later aesthetic developments. Longley’s comment that Heaney’s years as an undergraduate in Belfast and poet-apprentice in The Group laid ‘the ground for reciprocities’51 with America, therefore, contains more truth than has yet been fully recognised. Arguably, this ‘ground’ for connections with American writers was already taking shape in Northern Ireland thanks to those writers who had directly proceeded Heaney’s generation. Aside from Montague, John Hewitt had looked to American poetry for sustenance as he tried to envisage what kind of Ulster literary milieu might form in the years ahead.  Ibid., p.17.  ‘Bogland’, DD, p.55. 50  Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.132. 51  Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000), p.249. 48 49

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Writing from a Protestant perspective in ‘The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer’, an influential essay Heaney would have read,52 Hewitt laments the lack of ‘creative genius’ among the ‘uneven and lumpy mixture’ of ‘Scotsmen, Englishmen, and Welshmen’ in Ulster.53 Drawing parallels to New England where a comparable ‘Puritan nonconformity’54 flourished, Hewitt emphasises Frost’s value for Northern Irish writers, arguing that his ‘rural portraits’ and ‘avoidance of ornament and rhetoric’ make him an ideal model for local poets trying to uncover ‘what Ulster was and is’.55 However, Hewitt concludes his essay not with one of Frost’s North of Boston (1914) pastorals but by quoting the controversial late poem ‘The Gift Outright’, before surmising: ‘His finger has found our wound.’56 As Buxton notes, Heaney gives special attention to this passage of Hewitt’s essay in ‘Frontiers of Writing’, a lecture whose title may be a reference to Hewitt’s image of Donegal as ‘a frontier.’57 Heaney notes that Hewitt, when quoting from ‘The Gift Outright’, ‘dropped the line’ where Frost admits, in parenthesis, ‘(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)’, but ‘kept the line about the land being “unstoried, artless, unenhanced”’.58 For Heaney, Hewitt thereby participates ‘in Frost’s unconscious erasure of native American stories and arts and enhancements, and made a similar colonial erasure of the original native culture of Uladh.’59 Heaney’s analysis may have been influenced by Tom Paulin, who had earlier critiqued Frost’s ‘version of manifest destiny’ in ‘The Gift Outright’ because it virtually ‘wipes out Indian culture’.60 In his broad study of Frost’s politics, 52  Buxton writes ‘Heaney first encountered Hewitt’s “The Bitter Gourd” when he was reading for his masters’ in ‘regionalist poets of the 1930s through to the 1950s’. Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry, p.34. 53  John Hewitt, ‘The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer’, Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, edited by Tom Clyde (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1987), p.109. 54  Ibid., p110. 55  Ibid., p.121. 56  Ibid. 57  Ibid. Buxton argues: ‘That “our” of Hewitt’s – when he declares that Frost’s “finger has found our wound”  – is, of course, Protestant’. Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry, p.34. 58  Heaney, ‘Frontiers of Writing’, R, p.197. 59  Ibid. 60  Tom Paulin, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.172.

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however, Tyler Hoffman notes the irony that Frost, despite his depictions of violence against American natives,61 has remained a source of inspiration for several notable poets writing in a postcolonial context, including Heaney. Considering this ability of Frost’s to influence poets of disparate political impulses, Hoffman suggests: ‘if [..] Frost in his old age stands for the colonial violence of the U.  S., Frost at the beginning of his career appears in the guise of the postcolonial poet.’62 Heaney’s quarrel with Hewitt about his particular appropriation of Frost—Heaney’s ‘favorite poet’63 according to Vendler—exemplifies Hoffman’s argument, but it also highlights the fact that Frost’s appeal in Ulster is particularly noteworthy, in that it can extend to both nationalists and unionists, even while seeming to divide them. Several of the other American writers who were important to Heaney first came to prominence in the literary magazines of the early-mid twentieth century, where new kinds of poetry and criticism were promoted and the debate around American writing’s relationship to the English tradition was extended and complicated. The Dial, originally established in 1840 by Emerson and Margaret Fuller, is generally seen as ‘the father of the American little magazine.’64 Though it ceased publication in 1844, The Dial was revived multiple times and, from 1920–1929, published writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore65 (who famously rejected the work of Hart Crane when she was the magazine’s editor). The Dial also featured contributions from Ezra Pound and T.  S. Eliot who, as the editors of one authoritative bibliography argue, ‘introduced a new criticism to America—a criticism of learning and insight, and a criticism that kept a close eye on the organization of the work under discussion.’66 Other important periodicals included Rogue, established in 1915 and edited with the help of Lawrence, which published the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and Blast, dating from 1933, which published some of Carlos Williams’s stories. No history of this time in American literature  See ‘The Vanishing Red’, CPRF, p.142.  Tyler Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), p.218. 63  Helen Vendler, “Second Thoughts & Coda: Tell the truth. Do not be afraid’, Irish Pages Vol. 8, No. 2, Heaney, 2014, p.15. 64  Frederick J.  Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1946), p.196. 65  Ibid., p.259. 66  Ibid., p.197. 61 62

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would be complete without mention of Eliot’s The Criterion, a quarterly review that was published in London and ran from 1922–1939. It may have neglected ‘many important Americans’,67 but by publishing ‘The Waste Land’ and including reviews of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Eliot’s magazine helped define Modernism and enriched the debate around literary tradition. Surveying this landscape in the introductory essay to The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Vendler argues ‘[a]lthough the victories won by American modernists were indisputable, they were won chiefly by Americans who had Europeanized themselves with a vengeance.’68 Emphasising this point, Vendler adds: Pound and Eliot became expatriates; Frost went deliberately to England for three years and published his first book there; Stevens said that French and English constitute a single language. And Williams made himself so pointedly American only because he was by birth and education so European[.]69

While Vendler is right to stress the importance of Europe to the American writers of this era (particularly to Eliot and Pound), other critics have been keen to highlight the sometimes-overlooked ways in which other modern American poets retained their ‘Americanness’, despite their alliances with Europe. For instance, in his introduction to his 1962 anthology, Donald Hall argues that ‘there were the expatriates and there were the poets who remained’. While ‘Pound, Aiken, and Eliot congregated in London’, notable ‘things were also going on in New York […] Alfred Kreymbourg, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E.  E. Cummings, and Hart Crane mingled and established a domestic literary milieu.’70 Despite sharing little, in Hall’s view these writers were united insofar as they all ‘experimented with the use of common American speech, an indigenous language increasingly distinguishable from English.’71 Moore encodes these issues in her poem ‘England’, where she

 Ibid., p.380.  Helen Vendler, The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2003), pp.9–10. 69  Ibid., p.10. 70  Donald Hall, Contemporary American Poetry, selected and introduced by Donald Hall (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962), p.18. 71  Ibid. 67 68

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ironically compares the ‘baby rivers and little towns’72 of England with America, a ‘languageless country’73 that seems poor next to the cultural riches of Europe. In contrast to the sophistication of the Old World, in the United States ‘letters are written’ in ‘plain American which cats and dogs can read’; yet, in the very act of articulating these thoughts, Moore demonstrates that poetry lives here too and that literature ‘has never been confined to one locality’.74 Moore’s complex syllabic patterns—her ‘own rules’, as Elizabeth Bishop once wrote of her, the ‘reverse of “freedom”’—75 exemplify the fact that the historical tendency to equate formlessness with ‘Americanness’ and restriction with ‘Englishness’ does little to further our understanding of either tradition. One could argue, for instance, that poems such as ‘Desert Places’ or ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Frost, who famously declared that free verse was like playing tennis without a net,76 depict the quintessentially American notion of man alone in vast wilderness. Similarly, Lowell’s multiple sonnet volumes, despite their reliance on the fourteen-line frame that is itself so emblematic of European literary tradition, constitute a Whitmanian mosaic for their treatment of personal and communal history.77 Vendler herself argues that Lowell, through his translation-versions in Imitations (1961) and Near the Ocean (1964), ‘announced that American poetry henceforth would possess the past in a commanding, not subordinate manner.’78 This subversive quality is precisely what attracts Heaney to Lowell, and to the American formalists generally. In a later essay, Heaney wrote of Frost, John Crowe Ransom, and Lowell that he admired ‘their Joycean relish at being able to run a few rings around what had been done already’,79 a phrase that underscores an important symmetry between Irish and American writing in his eyes. To adapt another phrase of Heaney’s, he identifies with formal American  Marianne Moore, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p.53.  Ibid., p.54. 74  Ibid. 75  Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore’, Prose, edited by Lloyd Schwartz (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), p.133. 76  Frost remarked ‘For my pleasure I had as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down’ in ‘Poetry and School’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.168. 77  Richard Gray describes Lowell’s sonnets as ‘proof of his Americanness; for, taken together, they constitute an epic of the self.’ American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, p.255. 78  Vendler, The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, p.10. 79  Heaney, ‘Threshold and Floor’, Metre, Vol. 7, No. 8, Spring-Summer 2000, p.266. 72 73

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­ riting because he senses in it a shared desire to ‘take the English lyric and w make it eat stuff it had never eaten before […] and make it still an English lyric.’80 For the young Heaney the appeal of American writing was not in its eccentric reinvention of forms and styles, but in its masterful appropriation of them, in its exciting mixture of continuity and disjuncture with the English tradition that, by the time of his undergraduate years, had been deemed jaded and in need of renovation. Heaney first encountered contemporary American poetry as an undergraduate in the anthologies that were in circulation in the 1950s and ‘60s,81 in which different versions of what constituted American poetry (and what its relationship with the English tradition might be) were propounded and contested. In The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (1954)—an anthology Heaney appears to have owned—editor Geoffrey Moore argues that contemporary American poets were now engaging in a process of responding to ‘the power and diversity’ of America itself and, unlike their elders, they ‘no longer fly to Europe for refuge.’82 At this time Auden’s Faber Book of American Poetry (1956) was also highly influential in shaping perceptions of the American tradition. Auden famously contrasted American and British poetry by deploying a number of distinguishing terms (‘English’, ‘European’, ‘Old World’),83 arguing that American writing is defined by its radical diversity.84 For Auden, the very sounds of American writing (its ‘pitch’) are evidence of its alterity. Other anthologies  Harriet Cooke, ‘Harriet Cooke talked to the Poet Seamus Heaney’, The Irish Times, Friday, December 28, 1973, p.8. 81  Buxton notes that there were two anthologies at St Columb’s while Heaney attended school there: A Pageant of English Verse, edited by E. W. Parker (London: Longman’s, 1949) and Choose Again, edited by J. A. Stone (London: Harrap, 1949), p.43. 82  Geoffrey Moore, The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse, selected with an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Moore (London: Penguin, 1954), p.30. Heaney tells Henri Cole he first read Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard’ as an undergraduate in ‘The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Poetry’—Heaney is probably referring to The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse, where ‘Quaker’ is one of two Lowell poems collected, not Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry anthology, which was published one year after Heaney had graduated and where ‘Quaker’ is not one of the Lowell poems collected. 83   Kennedy-Andrews argues ‘Auden’s contrastive element shifts between “English”, “European” and “Old World” in the course of his introduction.’ Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection, p.3. 84  W. H. Auden declared that ‘[f]rom Byrant on, there is scarcely one American poet whose work, if unsigned, could be mistaken for that of an Englishman’, adding ‘no two poets could be more unlike each other than Longfellow and Whitman’. W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, Faber book of Modern American Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), p.9. 80

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around this time were controversial for their firm insistence on American poetry’s continuity with English writing. Kennedy-Andrews notes that both the ‘New Critical’ Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939)85 and New Poets of England and America (1957)86 anthologies presented American poetry as continuous with the English tradition and were hostile to notions of American aesthetic independence. In contrast to the bold statements of America’s uniqueness made earlier by Emerson and Whitman, at mid-century critical views about America’s degree of literary independence from Britain were undeniably mixed. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, an important shift was occurring within American poetry. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960) presented for the first time to a wide readership the American avant-garde and categorised poets into five distinct schools: ‘the Black Mountain Poets’, ‘the San Francisco Renaissance’, ‘the Beat Generation’, ‘the New York Poets’, and a fifth group with ‘no geographical definition’. Two years later, Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry (1962) opened with these lines: For thirty years an orthodoxy ruled American poetry. It derived from the authority of T. S. Eliot and the new critics; it exerted itself through the literary quarterlies and the universities. It asked for a poetry of symmetry, intellect, irony, and wit. The last few years have broken control of this orthodoxy.87

Hall includes several poets collected in Allen’s anthology, such as Snyder, John Ashbery, and Bly, and notes that among them ‘a new kind of imagination seems to be working.’88 The same year Hall’s anthology appeared, Alvarez famously contrasted the jaded British poetic scene with a vibrant American one in the introduction to his The New Poetry (1962), an extremely influential text in shaping perceptions of British poetry in this era (which Heaney owned).89 Kennedy-Andrews suggests that by the 85  Kennedy-Andrews argues that editor Cleanth Brooks sees the American tradition as an ‘English one, and is suspicious of claims about American literary nationalism.’ Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection, p.5. 86  Ibid., p.4. Andrews notes the team of ‘Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, and a brief introduction by Robert Frost, made no distinction between English and American poets.’ 87  Hall, Contemporary American Poetry, p.17. 88  Ibid., p.24. 89  Heather Clark writes that Heaney had ‘been deeply influenced’ by the anthology. Heather Clark, ‘The Belfast Group’, Seamus Heaney in Context, edited by Geraldine Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p.162.

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1960s—when Heaney was a young lecturer and poet-apprentice at the Group—the view promoted by Alvarez (and seemingly confirmed by the new anthologies of experimental American poetry) had become the ‘generally accepted argument’: American poetry was concerned with ‘authenticity, exploration, the creation of an individual vision’ while ‘the British/ Irish poet emphasizes native values and traditions, suspects experiment and newness for its own sake, and values perfection of the craft’.90 With these contrasting pictures emerging—a newly invigorated American poetry on one hand and tiring Movement verse on the other—it is easy to see why Heaney’s critics argued that the contemporary American poetry of this era was a liberating force on his verse when he visited California in 1970–71. Meanwhile, Northern Irish poetry was beginning to be treated as a unique phenomenon within the British-Irish literary scene by the anthologists of the 1970s and ‘80s. In The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry (1972), Derek Mahon argued ‘Northern poets’ were a ‘group apart’ and possessed ‘an inherited duality of cultural reference’.91 The rising visibility of Northern poets in the 1970s and the tendency to ascribe to them a ‘regionally defined aesthetic’92 was, as Fran Brearton highlights, ‘something from which they have benefited’.93 But it has also been controversial. Brearton cites the claim of John Montague—who saw himself as part of a global literary network—in his 1974 Faber Book of Irish Verse that ‘the poems of Longley, Mahon, Heaney and Simmons share an epigrammatic neatness which shows the influence of a limited British mode’. Later, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982) was contentious for the terms of its praise for Northern Irish poetry and for its inclusion of Northern Irish poets under the ‘British’ category. Kennedy-Andrews argues that Morrison and Motion trace ‘signs of rejuvenation in the ‘British’ scene’, somewhat controversially, ‘not to

 Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection, p.6.  Derek Mahon, ‘Introduction’, The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Derek Mahon (London: Sphere Books, 1972), p.14. 92  Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), p.86. 93   Fran Brearton, ‘“In a between world”: Northern Irish Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.132–133. 90 91

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America or Europe, but to Northern Ireland.’94 In their introduction, Morrison and Motion praised the Northern Irish poets’ ‘greater imaginative freedom and linguistic daring’ and for reasserting ‘the primacy of the imagination’.95 As one might expect, such pronouncements of Northern Ireland’s superior ‘daring’ were contested. In contrast to Morrison and Motion, Peter Porter argued that Northern poets had been given a ‘fool’s license’96 to sentimentalise death and history due to the political violence. Heaney himself noted ‘we cannot be unaware […] of the link between the political glamour of the place [Ulster], the sex-appeal of violence, and the prominence accorded to poets.’97 Heaney controversially entered the debate around the classification of Northern Irish poets when he refused to be included under the British category in Morrison and Motion’s anthology in ‘An Open Letter’,98 quite a Lowell-like stunt that put him at the centre of an already intense argument. A few years after Morrison and Motion’s anthology, however, Northern Irish poetry’s reputation was cemented by Paul Muldoon’s The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986), in which seven out of a total of ten poets were Northerners. Today, what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Belfast renaissance’ that included Heaney, Mahon, and Longley is considered a key strand of both British and Irish poetry in the twentieth century. In An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (2010), American editor Wes Davis synthesises what has become the official history of Northern Irish poetry: the ‘wry, disengaged style that Movement poets evolved’ caused Irish poets to look elsewhere for ‘stronger beer’;99 the ‘remarkable accomplishment of the Belfast poets’ that followed has stirred ‘a poetic revival that has since spread across the island’.100 Davis concludes by remarking that in this ‘relatively small space of an  Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection, p.8.  Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, eds., The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (London: Penguin, 1982), p.12. 96  Peter Porter, Observer, 19 December, 1982, p.24. 97  ‘Calling the Tune’, an interview with Tom Adair, Linen Hall Review Vol. 6, No.2 (Autumn 1989), p.5. 98  Heaney famously declared ‘Be advised / My passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen’ in ‘An Open Letter’, Field Day Theatre Company Pamphlet No. 2 (September 1983). 99  Wes Davis, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Wes Davis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p.8. 100  Ibid., p.13. 94 95

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island nation’, the ‘renewed literary vigor has fed on itself, with poets from the North and South reading and reviewing each other’s work, encouraging and disparaging their peers’ in a ‘lively interplay’ that ‘has made poetry a prominent feature of contemporary Ireland’s cultural identity’.101

iv The categorisation of Northern Irish writing as a distinct force comes in large part from the famous Belfast Group in the 1960s. As Brearton argues, the ‘story of the Belfast Group has become the stuff of myth’102 and, for Heaney at least, it has become an official origin story. The Group was run from 1963–1966 by Philip Hobsbaum, who had piloted a similar group in London and came to Queen’s as an avowed ‘formalist “new critic”’ with ‘a reputation as a talent spotter’.103 Heaney attended the Group from the beginning; other members at various times included the writers Longley, Stewart Parker, James Simmons, Bernard MacLaverty, and the critics Edna Longley and Michael Allen, who helped Heaney to ‘run a successor-Group’104 after Hobsbaum left Belfast in 1966. Longley stresses the New Critical approach of Hobsbaum’s Group meetings and how the emphasis given to ‘the concentrated lyric’ influenced the Group’s style of ‘close reading, practical criticism and vigorously contested value-­ judgements.’105 Heaney discussed the American writers Lowell and Ransom at the Group and recalls reading Theodore Roethke in the Critical Quarterly at this time. He also began reviewing contemporary American poetry in print and his poems in the Group folder bear traces of American influence, particularly that of Frost and Roethke. These early poems support Longley’s argument that, during this period, Heaney, Mahon, and Longley each ‘picked up echoes of familiar religious and cultural dynamics in the American poetry that seems most important to them’ (and that they each preferred ‘more concentrated and formal kinds of American poetry.’)106 That Heaney’s burst of interest in American writing  Ibid., p.14.  Brearton, ‘Poetry of the 1960s’, The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, p.100. 103  Ibid. 104  Longley, ‘Afterword’, Michael Allen Close Readings: Essays on Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2015), p.301. 105  Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity, p.249. 106  Ibid., p.274. 101 102

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was concurrent with the discovery of his own lyric voice—the one that led him to become Hobsbaum’s ‘star’—107 has long deserved more critical attention. The Group has, however, been the subject of controversy in some critical commentary. In 2015, Longley wrote that Heather Clark’s The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–72 (2006) ‘overplays the group’s impact and underplays the common ground earlier established between Derek Mahon and Michael Longley in the literary milieu of Trinity College Dublin.’108 Longley argues that Clark’s study emphasises Hobsbaum and ‘mentions Michael Allen only in passing.’109 For Longley, it was Allen, the Queen’s American literature lecturer, who ‘was the critic whose judgement most Group members most valued’, while ‘Hobsbaum’s stormy opinions make him appear more of a personal force than, in my opinion, he actually was.’110 Allen ‘had belonged to the critically and poetically savvy English department of Leeds University’ before he arrived in Belfast, where the ‘Group, like his students, benefitted from Michael’s genius for doing complicated criticism orally.’111 As an American literature specialist at Queen’s from 1964–2001, it is fair to say, as Brearton and Eamonn Hughes posit in Last Before America: Irish and American Writing (2001), that Allen himself ‘may be the cause, as well as the critic of some […] Irish/American poetic connections’112 in the poetry that came out of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and ‘70s. Longley recalls the atmosphere was like a ‘Stalinist purge’ when Hobsbaum eventually ejected Allen under ‘the pretext that the Group contained too many critics—rather than too many who disagreed with Hobsbaum.’113

 SS, p.76.  Longley, Close Readings, p.299. 109  Ibid., p.300. 110  Ibid. Longley writes ‘Hobsbaum was certainly formidable when he presided over the sessions in which we dissected new poems or prose, reproduced on cyclostyled sheets, while their author trembled. But, just as his poetry had little influence […], neither was he the most influential critical voice.’ 111  Ibid. Allen joined the Queen’s faculty in 1964. 112  Brearton and Eamonn Hughes, eds. Last before America: Irish and American Writing (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2001), p.xi. 113  Ibid., p.301, Longley quotes Richard Kurkland’s interview with Allen, where Allen recalls he was thrown out of the Group ‘for dissidence, for not agreeing with Hobsbaum’s criteria over lots of things.’ 107 108

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In a more recent essay, Clark argues that, while ‘Hobsbaum did not singlehandedly inspire Belfast’s young writers’,114 his literary qualifications, extensive network, and ‘Jewishness allowed him to transcend the sectarian divisions that haunted Belfast’115 and build the confidence of its unpublished writers. Though it is unlikely that, without Hobsbaum, Heaney would have ‘remained a mute’116 (in Dillon Johnston’s phrase), Clark points out that Hobsbaum ‘hand-delivered Heaney’s poems to the most important editors in London, perhaps saving him years of frustration.’117 Much has been written—particularly by critics in Northern Ireland— about the prevailing critical atmosphere at the Group. Some commentators have explored the degree to which the prevailing critical climate of Hobsbaum’s Group shaped the young Heaney’s poetic thought; others have argued for the significance of this critical grounding to his later American success. Brearton notes that Hobsbaum had ‘been taught by F. R. Leavis and worked with William Empson’ and came to Queen’s with ‘an avowed aim “to take Leavis’s approach into the modern sector”; to apply ‘the practice of Leavisite Criticism—“closer and more analytical discussion”’ of the text itself.118 Allen argues that the era’s ‘Anglo-American “New Criticism” […] governed the young Heaney’s notions of poetic technique’119 while Longley, quoting this statement of Allen’s, adds that this New Critical schooling created Heaney’s ‘ground for reciprocities’ with ‘“non-Irish” American audiences’,120 particularly with Vendler. Gail McConnell, who develops this argument significantly, identifies wider parallels between the critical landscapes of Northern Ireland and America: While the influence of Leavisite New Criticism on Irish literary studies— Catholic, Protestant or otherwise—has been frequently discussed, literary criticism in the United States, as in the work of Robert Penn Warren,  Clark, ‘The Belfast Group’, p.172.  Ibid.; Clark writes that Philip Hobsbaum had ‘recently finished a PhD at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of the legendary critic William Empson’ when he came to Belfast in 1962, p.167. 116  Quoted by Clark, p.173. 117  Ibid., p.174. 118  Brearton, Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, p.101. 119  Allen’s casebook includes several essays which, in his own words, chart the emergence of ‘a challenging range of critical methodologies to compete with’ this brand of New Criticism. New Casebooks: Seamus Heaney, edited by Michael Allen (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997), p.1. 120  Longley, Poetry and Posterity, p.249. 114 115

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Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt, perhaps provides an even more significant model and context for the appropriation of New Critical frameworks in Irish literary criticism.121

McConnell explains that ‘American New Criticism is much more deeply invested in the idea of the well-wrought poem outside of history, culture and politics than Leavis’, and thus American New Criticism has a particular utility in Northern Ireland, where ‘poetry criticism, too, seeks a way out of history.’122 Heaney’s analytical critical readings of other poets’ work certainly reflect his New Critical training at Queen’s, but Dennison cautions ‘[t]here is little to suggest’ Heaney’s critical ideas have ‘direct antecedents in the classic texts of New Criticism’—the ‘most likely of these, W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon, he has said he did not read.’123 As Dennison’s comment highlights, in interviews Heaney often minimises his capacity as a critic. In Stepping Stones he stresses that he was never ‘academically ambitious’124 and that, later at Harvard, his teaching lacked the ‘professional theory-­ speak’125 the age required. Despite this admitted ‘amateur’126 status, however, some of Heaney’s harsher critics have admired the perceptiveness of his critical writings. Michael Cavanagh notes that Heaney’s essays have received praise from even ‘the hard-to-please Peter McDonald’; McDonald describes the close readings collected in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (2002) as ‘enough to give him serious critical weight, and an assured currency’.127 Heaney may not have felt that he had a highly sophisticated knowledge of literary theory, but he, like many of his critics, has recognised that his approach to practical criticism provided a significant ‘common denominator’128 with Vendler, in whose commentary his poems are well-served by a 121  Gail McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.50. 122  Ibid., pp.50–51. 123  John Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p.35. 124  SS, p.229. 125  SS, p.104. 126  Ibid. 127  Quoted in Michael Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2009), p.3. 128  SS, p.348.

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focus on ‘the structural and stylistic’129 qualities of the poetry. First meeting Heaney at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 1975, Vendler would become a prolific champion of his work in print. Essays on Heaney’s work appeared in Vendler’s The Music of What Happens (1988), Soul Says (1995), The Breaking of Style (1995) and the shorter and limited-edition publication Seamus Heaney and the Grounds of Hope (2004). In her full study, Seamus Heaney (1998), Vendler praises North (1975) as ‘one of the crucial poetic interventions of the twentieth century, ranking with Prufrock and Harmonium and North of Boston in its key role in the history of modern poetry.’130 Meanwhile, Vendler became dedicatee of Heaney’s Hailstones (1984) and The Spirit Level (1996), and even accompanied Heaney as a guest to the 1995 Nobel Prize ceremony. Vendler continues to write about Heaney and read, with commentary, at a memorial service held at Harvard on November 7, 2013.131 In conversation with O’Driscoll, Heaney stresses that he shares with Vendler not only a fondness for ‘close-­ reading’ and ‘memorization’, but ‘a belief in poetry as something substantial and sustaining.’132 Her encouragement and her authoritative endorsements of Heaney consolidated his canonisation as one of the greats of modern poetry, a process that began even while he was still alive. Heaney’s close relationship with Vendler (and the particular terms of her praise for his achievement) came under scrutiny at home, with some denouncing what they saw as the ‘Vendlerising of the Heaney oeuvre’.133 The most controversial assessment of the Heaney-Vendler relationship was that of Desmond Fennell, who began his 1991 pamphlet: ‘In Ireland we have the habit of leaving it to foreigners to write the books about our famous writers.’134 Noting how Heaney ‘nudged aside John Ashbery to succeed Robert Lowell as the poet laureate of the academy’ on the ‘American East Coast’, Fennell argues that though Heaney is undeniably a ‘good’ poet, ‘the reasons for his exceptional degree of transatlantic

 Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.3.  Ibid. 131  Sophia Nguyen, ‘A New Life for Heaney’s Home at Harvard’, Harvard Magazine, 31 March, 2015, web. 132  SS, p.348. 133  Karl Miller uses this phrase in interview with Heaney. Miller, Seamus Heaney: In Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p.49. 134  Desmond Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1 (Dublin: ELO Publications, 1991), foreword. 129 130

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elevation are not immediately obvious.’135 For Fennell, the ‘decisive’ factor in this American success was ‘the fact that Heaney’s work was congenial to the American poetry establishment—particularly to its queen, Helen Vendler—and that he worked, successfully, to make it more so.’136 Fennell objected, as other critics would also, to the sense in which Vendler’s reading of Heaney extracts him from the British-Irish context and engages with his poems primarily on the level of their internal linguistic features, without sufficiently analysing their themes or political frames. This is certainly McDonald’s view, who argued in 2001 that Heaney’s poetry has been subject to ‘an excessive (but in crucial respects myopic) critical scrutiny’,137 adding that Vendler’s analysis ‘renders him almost contextless, like a made-in-Ireland Grecian urn’.138 In Seamus Heaney, Vendler argues that Heaney’s ‘adversary critics’ make the ‘mistake’ of reading his poems ‘as statements of a political position’,139 whereas her own study aims ‘chiefly to show by what imaginative structural and stylistic means Heaney raises his subjects to a plane that compels such worldwide admiration.’140 Vendler’s emphasis on close reading of the text stood in contrast to the emergence of challenging theoretical frameworks which, in Allen’s view, ‘widened the conceptual vocabulary of Anglo-American criticism’141 and put Heaney’s achievement in the more vulnerable context of the ‘political dialectic, familiar to poststructuralist thought, of ‘Identity and Difference’.142 Defending her own position, Vendler argues that the ‘terms of reproof against Heaney have been almost entirely thematic’, adding ‘I myself regard thematic arguments about poetry as beside the point […] poetry never stands or falls on its themes’.143 To this, Brearton responds ‘neither does it stand or fall regardless of them’.  Ibid., p.7.  Ibid., p.29. 137  Peter McDonald, ‘Faiths and Fidelities: Heaney and Longley in Mid-Career’, Last before America: Irish and American Writing, p.5. 138  Ibid., p.6. 139  Vendler, Seamus Heaney, p.9. 140  Ibid., p.6. 141  In the introductory essay to his casebook, Allen describes how scholarly interpretations of Heaney’s work have varied as critical fashions have shifted toward the ‘Formalist/structuralist/poststructuralist’ perspective, which tends to ‘treat literature not only as made up of language […] but also as though it is itself a language.’ See Allen, New Casebooks: Seamus Heaney, edited by Michael Allen, pp.5–6. 142  Quoted by Allen, New Casebooks: Seamus Heaney, p.12. 143  Vendler, Seamus Heaney, p.6. 135 136

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For Brearton, Vendler’s reading of Heaney is essentially ‘a Romantic one’, which is ‘the way Heaney sometimes himself asks to be read’.144 Echoing Brearton, Quinn argues that Vendler, despite claiming themes are ‘beside the point’, often does engage with certain themes in Heaney’s work ‘in order to read Heaney as, like her, an advocate of lyric poetry’, thereby creating ‘a blind spot in her criticism’.145 What some of these critics object to in Vendler’s analysis of Heaney’s work is the sense in which the criticism often seems to accord too neatly with Heaney’s own values, resulting in close readings—perhaps the most authoritative in Heaney commentary—that Heaney would almost certainly approve of. Dennison has explored what he terms Heaney’s ‘feedback loop with Vendler’,146 and, indeed, one does not have to look far to find evidence of their shared ideal of a poetics of ‘universality’147 in their critical writings. A phrase of Vendler’s such as ‘[t]he world of the poem is analogous to the existential world, but not identical with it’148 would not appear out of place in The Government of the Tongue (1988), where Heaney argues ‘that poetry is its own reality’,149 or his Nobel speech, where, Vendler in attendance, he claims ‘poetry can make an order’ that is ‘true to the impact of external reality’.150 While an extremely significant factor in Heaney’s reputation and his residency in America, then, the Heaney-­ Vendler relationship has been criticised by some critics in Ireland for two main reasons. Firstly, because it seemed to typify a dubious synergy of poetry and criticism in the American academy where the poem ends up serving the criticism by which it, in turn, is well-served. Secondly, because it apparently confirmed what many had suspected: that, in Quinn’s terms, Heaney’s ‘poetry could be slotted into a narrative of victimhood’, namely a postcolonial one, thus ‘allowing US critics to overlook those aspects of the poetry which they would have questioned in an American writer.’151 144  Brearton, ‘Heaney and the Feminine’, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.82. 145  Justin Quinn, ‘Critical Audiences’, Seamus Heaney in Context, p.287. 146  Dennison, The Adequacy of Poetry, p.212, Dennison reads Heaney’s Vendler-dedicated ‘Hermit Songs’ as evidence of their common faith in a ‘poetics that aspires to universality’, p.211. 147  Ibid. 148  Vendler, The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, p.8. 149  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.101. 150  CP, p.449. 151  Quinn, ‘Critical Audiences’, p.287.

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The chasm between critical reactions to Heaney’s work in America and Northern Ireland is most noticeable in the debate around North, a volume that still sharply divides opinion for its treatment of political violence. Lowell extolled the volume as evidence of Heaney’s superiority over his contemporaries; Vendler, in a high-profile review for The New York Times, argued Heaney was ‘to my mind the best poet now writing in Ireland’ and ‘the only one of his generation not in some way inhibited by the shadow of Yeats.’152 At home, however, Heaney received hard criticism from Ciaran Carson in a now-famous review published in the Honest Ulsterman. In Carson’s view, in North Heaney glossed over ‘the real differences between our society and Jutland’: [i]t is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution […] So, when he writes ‘Act of Union’ Ireland’s relationship with England is sentimentalised into something as natural as a good fuck—being something that has always happened, everywhere, there is no longer any need to explain; it is like a mystery of the Catholic Church, ritualized and mystified into a willing ignorance.153

Longley was critical of North as well, and claimed that it ‘stylises and distances’ its subject matter ‘into a less original form’ by ‘plucking out the heart of his mystery and serving it up as a quasi-political mystique’.154 For Vendler and Lowell, North was the confident emergence of a new poetic voice who could speak for (and to) Ireland on the international stage; for critics at home, North represented an aestheticisation of the violence that had become for many a devastating, lived reality. Reflecting on the context of Heaney’s reception during the years of his ‘increasing international renown’, McDonald argues that Heaney has tended to be ‘over-praised’,155 and that criticism from Northern Ireland has often provided a ‘steady, intelligent, and responsible’156 resistance to the uncritical praise of international reviewers seeking to advertise poetry  Vendler, ‘Poet of Silence, Poet of Talk’, The New York Times, April 18, 1976, web.  Ciaran Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre?’, The Honest Ulsterman, 50 (Winter 1975), pp.184–185. 154  Longley, ““Inner Emigré” or “Artful Voyeur”? Seamus Heaney’s North’, New Casebooks: Seamus Heaney, edited by Michael Allen, p.61. 155  McDonald, ‘Faiths and Fidelities’, p.5. 156  Ibid., p.6. 152 153

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from Ireland. For this reason, McDonald argues that ‘praise from Belfast means more, and reveals more, than celebration from the American academe’.157 Heaney himself has reflected he felt ‘over-praised’158 early in his career and has acknowledged that Lowell’s comparison to Yeats ‘rocked the boat’159 in Ireland. He also stated that in America ‘there is a vast, inflationary, reputation-making business and I myself am part of it […] I have an impulse to flee from it, even while benefitting from it.’160 Equally, however, Heaney has commented how, in his view, such praise abroad helped to ‘sharpen the quills’161 at the Honest Ulsterman, and that he felt ‘a kind of bitter drive to a lot of that stuff’: ‘people I’d been close to in different degrees were serving notice that the terms of the relationship had changed […] The whole attitude derived from a submerged consensus, a feeling that I’d already got more than my due’.162 Heaney’s various remarks imply that he developed a detachment from what he saw as the inevitable overpraising and score-settling nature of much poetic criticism in America and Northern Ireland. But whatever Heaney’s own assessments of his reception, it is fair to say that, as America has acted as one form of gravity, at first to pull him there and later to enlarge his reputation, Northern Ireland has tended to function as another gravity on him, to bring his achievement back to Ulster and ask tougher questions of his poetry; to probe the reasons for his acclaim abroad and to examine the manner in which he came to be ‘famous Seamus’, and to determine whether his remarkable success has come at too great a cost to those poets he arguably overshadowed. Readers of this study may be surprised that it does not contain a chapter on the American-born Eliot, whose achievement is generally considered to be more significant and influential in modern poetry than those writers discussed here. While it is true that Eliot was a major force in literature when Heaney was an undergraduate and teacher at Queen’s University, Heaney’s poems from this era tell a clear story of an emergence of self in response to poetry in which he recognised his own experiences, thus, as Auden says of Thomas Hardy’s influence on his own work, he ‘was being  Ibid.  Robert McCrum, ‘Seamus Heaney: A Life in Rhyme’, Guardian, July 19, 2009, web. 159  SS, p.166. 160  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, p.18. 161  SS, p.166. 162  SS, p.161. Heaney remarks ‘Edna Longley’s “Cliquey Clerihew” was a merry straw in that particular wind: “Michael Longley / Is inclined to feel strongly / About being less famous / Than Seamus”’. 157 158

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led towards not away from’163 himself. Heaney has remarked that Eliot did not inspire him in this way. On one occasion Heaney recalls that as an undergraduate he ‘had some notion that modern poetry was far beyond the likes of me—there was Eliot and so on’. The ‘thrill’, he explains, came from ‘trusting my own background’.164 In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, he elaborates on this topic further, explaining: As an undergraduate at Queen’s University, of course I had been lectured on contemporary poetry, and I had read Eliot […] But I had swallowed the standard line that contemporary poetry was urban, ironical, detached. I mean, the intonations of Eliot I could hear as a listener, but they didn’t enter me or waken anything in me[.]165

Though Eliot’s theories of tradition had helped to shape poetic criticism by the time Heaney was an undergraduate, poetic ‘influence’, as Harold Bloom notes, ‘cannot be willed’.166 In contrast to Eliot, the American writers discussed in depth in the chapters that follow—Frost, Ransom, Roethke, Lowell, and Bishop—each awakened in Heaney a sense that poetry was within reach and that he, like them, could develop a unique voice to express the matters of his own background and experience. It cannot be denied, however, that America itself is lacking from the subject matter of Heaney’s poems. Only one poem in Wintering Out mentions California and there is only ‘Villanelle for an Anniversary’ to represent Heaney’s association with Harvard.167 This points to a significant truth that some critics have found difficult to reconcile: neither Heaney’s 1970–71 year in California, nor his longer residency in Harvard, drastically bent the needle, as it were, away from the places or values he absorbed in Ireland before he ever went to the US. In O’Brien’s recent collection of essays on Heaney’s later poetry, one of Heaney’s most sensitive critics, Corcoran, remarks that continuity rather than breakage is most apparent when all his volumes of poetry are taken together. Corcoran therefore sees  Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p.38.  James Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares Vol. 5, No. 3. 1979, p.14. 165  Eleanor Wachtel, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Brick 86, Winter 2010, web. 166  Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p.11. 167  Berkeley is briefly mentioned in ‘Ministry of Fear’, N, and Harvard trees feature in ‘Canopy’, HC. 163 164

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the appropriateness of the classical descriptor Mahon applies to Heaney in the ‘admiring pastiche’168 poem ‘A Country Kitchen’: ‘If a thing happens once / it happens forever’. Quoting Mahon, Corcoran adds, ‘you cannot step into the same river twice, says Heraclitus: but you can step into it once for ever, says Derek Mahon when he thinks of Seamus Heaney.’169 Mahon’s is a superb metaphor for Heaney’s total achievement, and Heaney often repeated a similar image towards the end of his career to describe his own sense of life’s continuity. In his interview with Cole he describes life as ‘a series of ripples widening out from an original centre’, explaining ‘that original pulse of your being is still travelling in you and through you […] your first self and your last self are by no means distinct.’170 In the 1960s, Heaney steps into the ‘river’ of himself ‘once’ and ‘forever’ with the help of the American writers discussed here. As their energies ripple through him in the years ahead, they help to drive his poetry into new phases while at the same time linking back to this point of origin in Belfast. Heaney’s absorption and reapplication of his American models thus offers a powerful illustration of the sense in which poetic influence can be as ‘substantial and sustaining’171 as poetry itself.

168  Corcoran, ‘Happening Once and Forever: Heaney’s Late Style’, “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”, edited by Eugen O’Brien, p.119. 169  Ibid., p.120. 170  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, Paris Review, 1997, web. 171  SS, p.348.

CHAPTER 2

Belfast: Heaney in the 1960s

During the formative years of Heaney’s education in Northern Ireland, American poetry was instrumental in the development of his early poetics. As a student at St Columb’s (1951–1957), Queen’s University Belfast (1957–1961), and while at The Group (1962–1966), numerous poets of different national traditions became strong and well-noted influences on his critical thinking and poetic style.1 In the late 1950s and 1960s, three American poets awakened his poetic impulse to a degree not yet fully understood: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, and Theodore Roethke. It is possible to trace Heaney’s absorption of vital elements from these writers from his time at The Group to Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), where their examples were essential to the development of the early Heaney voice. From Frost, Heaney takes a rugged texture and an understanding of poetry’s binary relationship to the world; from Ransom he learns a more polished formal elegy; and, through a more critical engagement with Roethke, he develops the child’s-eye pastoral of some of his most anthologised work. All three of these writers offered the seductive combination of an enabling verse of shared themes  Elmer Andrews notes that ‘[e]arly critics were quick to point out the influences of Wordsworth, Hughes and Hopkins as well as the examples of Yeats, Kavanagh and Hewitt closer to home, and Frost in America.’ The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Elmer Andrews (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998), p.8. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7_2

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and lively essays on poetic theory. A diligent student who gained a first-­ class degree in English from Queen’s, Heaney’s early poems speak to his studious nature in their sensitive development of the stylings he admired in others. The use of influence in Heaney’s early phase thus corroborates the overall impression given by his early volumes: for the young Heaney, literature represented a form of labour to which he could dedicate himself with a great deal of personal conviction. Commentators have tended to undervalue Heaney’s exposure to American poetry while he was at Queen’s University and underplay his competency as a critic of American writing in the 1960s. Several years prior to his residency as visiting lecturer at the University of California, Heaney published reviews of key influences Roethke and Robert Lowell as well as a lesser known 1965 commentary on the work of Edward LucieSmith, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Marianne Moore. In his analysis of The Dream Songs (1969), Heaney praises Berryman’s portrayal of an American society ‘careering down the rails of materialism’ while Moore, he argues, has written ‘good poetry since 1915’ and he continues to be ‘impressed with the subtle playing off of line endings against the easy cadences of the American voice.’2 Heaney’s confident generalisations reflect his overlooked experience as a lecturer at Queen’s University, where he taught alongside Michael Allen, the American Literature specialist who Edna Longley (herself a Queen’s lecturer in the 1960s) describes as a ‘friend and mentor of poets’3 in Belfast at this time. Heaney pays tribute to Allen in the foreword of Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (1980), his first volume of critical essays, describing him as ‘the reader over my shoulder’.4 It remains open to speculation how much Allen may have been responsible for Heaney’s interest in, and absorption of, American poetry in this phase. Appointed to the Queen’s faculty in 1966, Heaney was given responsibility for ‘the First Arts poetry lectures, and taught Modern Literature seminars’;5 the set texts recorded for the First Arts module in the Queen’s Calendar for the academic year 1966–67 include William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, and Frost alongside British and Irish writers as required reading.6 It was during this period of teaching and writing that  Seamus Heaney, ‘Confessions and Histories’, Outposts, summer 1965, p.23.  Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), p.263. 4  Foreword, P, p.14. 5  SS, p.102. 6  Queen’s Calendar 66–7, Special Collections, The McClay Library, Queen’s University, Belfast. 2 3

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Heaney discovered all of his major American influences besides Frost, whom he had first read as an undergraduate. Heaney’s early engagement with Frost, Ransom, and Roethke begins a clear pattern in which Heaney looks to American poets to help him develop key aspects of his own poetics. In one of the first studies of Heaney’s poetry, Neil Corcoran observes Heaney ‘trying on’ the ‘styles and manners’7 of various influences in Death of a Naturalist—this process begins (and is plainer to see) in Heaney’s Group era where his poems clearly evidence the influence of the American poetry he was reading, along with that of Ted Hughes and Patrick Kavanagh. Among Heaney’s early American exemplars, Frost’s influence is typically the most acknowledged by critics and by Heaney himself,8 particularly for his depictions of farming and his ‘sound of sense’9 aesthetic principle. Frost’s praise of the poem as ‘a momentary stay against confusion’10 becomes a key principle for Heaney in this phase, but it also becomes a kind of critical filter that he uses throughout his career to sort poets into two groups: those who he deems ‘adequate’11 and those who are ‘inadequate’.12 John Dennison has examined this teleological strain of Heaney’s poetics of adequacy in great detail already; this chapter argues simply that Frost played an intriguing and perhaps overlooked role in the formation of Heaney’s poetic theory during an era when he was absorbing the writing that would undergird his later formulations of poetry’s redemptive capability.  Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p.49.  Frost’s influence on Heaney was noted from the start of Heaney’s career but to date Rachel Buxton in Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) has offered the most thorough research on the subject. The Frost-Heaney link is also given specific attention by Stephen James in ‘Dividing Lines: Robert Frost and Seamus Heaney’, Symbiosis 3, No. 1 (Apr. 1999), pp.63–76, and David Mason in ‘Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and the Wellsprings of Poetry’, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 108, No 1. (2000), pp.41–57. Earlier, Blake Morrison p.12, Neill Corcoran 1986 p.47, and Thomas foster p.21 all note Frost’s influence in studies published in the 1980s. 9  Robert Frost, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrence Thompson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p.80. 10  Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.132. 11  John Dennison argues Heaney’s ‘formulation “images and symbols adequate to our predicament’ has become a locus classicus of Heaney criticism’. Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p.4. 12  Heaney once memorably described John Ashbery’s poetry as ‘sorrowfully inadequate’, see Conclusion. 7 8

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Despite Heaney’s numerous mentions of Ransom as another poet who was ‘deeply laid down’13 in him in the 1960s, critical discussions of Ransom’s significance have been limited to consideration of the impact of New Criticism while Heaney was a student at Queen’s. There has been no sustained comparative analysis of their poetry, despite the echoes of Ransom’s ‘Dead Boy’ in one of Heaney’s most lauded early poems, ‘Mid-­ Term Break’. Similarly, though Roethke is named in many of the major Heaney studies, he is usually credited as a corroborating voice rather than an enabling one. But when Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist poems, written from the point of view of the small child, are viewed as a sequence and compared to Roethke’s greenhouse poems from The Lost Son & Other Poems (1948), a clear symmetry emerges. This should not be surprising, since Heaney admits he read Roethke in the Critical Quarterly in the mid-­ sixties14 and even reviewed his poetry in 196815 in an article that reveals a deep immersion in the American poet’s achievement. Moreover, aside from the depictions of a botanical childhood world that characterise much of his poetry, Roethke’s lively prose often draws on the shared influences of W. B. Yeats, Frost, and Ransom, making his achievement a particularly valuable source of strength for the young Heaney as he was just beginning to discover his own lyric potential.

i At St Columb’s, Derry, where he boarded 1951–57, Heaney’s response to the syllabus reading was, with the exception of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, relatively unenthusiastic.16 Heaney reflected on one occasion that poetry lessons were ‘a kind of force-feeding’ that ‘did not delight us by reflecting our experience’ and, ‘in fact, were rather like catechism lessons: official inculcations of hallowed formulae that were somehow expected to stand us in good stead in the adult life that stretched out

 Randy Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, No. 80 (1988), p.15.  SS, p.85. 15  ‘Canticles to the Earth’, originally printed in The Listener in 1968 and later collected in P, pp.190–94. 16  Heaney’s sixth form English Literature teacher Sean B. O’Kelly had himself produced an MA thesis on Thomas Hardy and encouraged Heaney’s love of Hopkins, who he first read in A Pageant of English Verse, one of two poetry anthologies available at St Columb’s at this time. See Buxton, p.43. 13 14

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ahead.’17 When Heaney arrived at Queen’s University in 1957, Hopkins remained a central influence and the first poems he published in university magazines were, in his own terms, written in ‘Hopkins-speak.’18 However, as an undergraduate Heaney would benefit from a crucial reading of Frost in Laurence Lerner’s American literature class in 1958. Michael Parker notes the unique appeal of Frost for Heaney during this time, ‘at a stage when he was tentatively seeking out non-English models’.19 Frost did in fact have to be sought out as Parker describes, as he was only available for study at Queen’s on a specialist course of American writing that Heaney chose over one that offered Yeats and James Joyce.20 Seamus Deane also took this American writing course and remembers his own infatuation with Stevens and how Heaney ‘hung smilingly onto Frost’,21 reflecting on another occasion that ‘almost all Heaney’s poems were pastiches, poems molded around the contours of poems written by writers he favoured’—namely Frost.22 The element of Frost’s poetry that most interested Heaney was the ‘sound of sense’ concept, an aesthetic principle that Frost coined to explain the superiority of his own realistic speech-driven poetry over the sonorous musicality of nineteenth century poems. It was not lost on Heaney that Frost’s thick textures were propitious to the anti-Movement feeling in the British poetry scene at this time (evidenced by the ascendancy of Ted Hughes’s rugged example). In Heaney’s own words, ‘the orthodox idea’ while he was an undergraduate was ‘that the age demanded a bit of roughening up of the utterance, an avoidance of smooth numbers, you were meant to hit the stride of living speech.’ His preference for this style, he explains, ‘was going on before I got linked up with The Group and received more explicit encouragement from Philip Hobsbaum to roughen up.’23 Frost elaborated on the ‘sound of sense’ idea across his letters, interviews, and critical writings. The principle consists of a belief that sentence  ‘Mossbawn’, P, p.26.  SS, p.37. 19  Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993), p.24. 20  In one later revealing conversation with John Haffenden, Heaney rates Frost’s ‘The Most of It’ as ‘a better poem than “The Second Coming”’. John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p.70. 21  Seamus Deane to Rachel Buxton, 3 March, 1999. See Buxton, p.44. 22  Seamus Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus’, New Yorker (20 March, 2000), p.64. 23  SS, p.40. 17 18

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sounds carry ‘all that the sentence conveys with little or no help from the meaning of the words.’24 Frost believed the ‘abstract vitality of our speech’ allowed meaning to form ‘without the words in which they are embodied’, as in overheard voices ‘behind a door that cuts off the words.’25 For Frost, sound is indissolubly mixed with meaning, and the true artist exploits this, either by allowing sound to conspire with the images of a poem or by opposing sound and sense to create ‘irony’.26 Frost utilises the ‘sound of sense’ most obviously in his dialogue poems, such as ‘Home Burial’ where sound is used to balance tension in a musical orchestration, or ‘The Death of a Hired Man’, where another heated discussion is charged as much by sentence sound as by image or argument. Frost’s ‘The Axe-Helve’ manages to explain the ‘sound of sense’27 while simultaneously demonstrating it: He showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. And there its strength lay[.]28

Like the ‘lines of a good helve’, the sounds necessary for poetry are ‘native’ to ‘the grain’ of language before the poetic form ‘Expressed them’. Throughout the poem, Frost’s delivery of common speech in iambic pentameter exemplifies his lesson that poetic music is not applied ‘from without’ but drawn out from within.29 This ideal becomes deeply lodged in Heaney’s thinking and is referred to several times in his prose, most memorably in ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps: Sylvia Plath’ where he merges it with Eliot’s auditory imagination to suggest, in Buxton’s terms, ‘perfectly realized cadences of speech […] connect an individual’s utterance to a common heritage by tapping into a shared ancestry.’30  Frost, Selected Letters, p.140.  Ibid., p.80. 26  Ibid., p.113. 27  Frost, Selected Letters, p.80. 28  RFCP, p.187. 29  There is an echo of this image in Heaney’s explanation of Mandelstam’s re-canonisation of Dante as ‘sponsor of impulse and instinct’, whose ‘three-edged stanza is formed from within, like a crystal, not cut on the outside like a stone’ in ‘Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.94. 30  Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry, p.91. 24 25

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In many of the poems submitted to The Group for weekly discussion, Heaney is experimenting with a Frostian approach to poetic sound and speech. The uncollected ‘In Glenelly Valley’, a poem in which a typical rural encounter is elevated, is an early attempt to transpose what Frost calls the ‘abstract vitality’31 of speech into verse. Though Heaney’s use of speech would become more accomplished in later poems, there are clear parallels in ‘In Glenelly Valley’ with Frost’s metrical speech and rich textures (which the young Heaney would use more successfully in early poems like ‘Death of a Naturalist’ and ‘Churning Day’). While some critics feel Heaney ‘lays it on rather thick’32 in his use of onomatopoeic language in these early poems, they display a commendable ambition to capture the ‘sound and sense’, or, rather, they explore what it might mean in an Irish context to install the ‘ear’ as ‘the only true writer and the only true reader’,33 as Frost instructs. The ‘sound of sense’ is connected to the more significant lesson Heaney takes from Frost: an understanding of the poem as ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’34 The phrase, which appears in Frost’s essay ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ (1939), crystallises the binary between art and world that would become the foundation for Heaney’s own poetic thinking. For Heaney, the poem’s formal structure—constituted in part by its sound system—is critical to its capacity to ‘stay against confusion’; or, in other words, its ability to resist the destructive counterforce of reality depends on the conceptions of poetry Frost evangelises in his criticism: [t]he sound is the gold in the ore […] the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre are not enough. We need the help of context—meaning—subject matter. […] It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life […] in a momentary stay against confusion.35

 Frost, Selected Letters, p.140.  Rita Zoutenbier, ‘The Matter of Ireland and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney’, Modern Critical Views: Seamus Heaney, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publications, 1986), p.54. 33  Frost, Selected Letters, p.113. 34  Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Collected Prose, p.132. 35  Ibid., pp.131–32. 31 32

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As an undergraduate student Heaney was fond of these kinds of definitive statements of poetry’s efficacy. Dennison notes that many of Heaney’s student notebooks ‘consist primarily of extracts copied verbatim, or occasionally paraphrased, from works of literary criticism, giving an impression of a careful rote learning of the chief problems and answers regarding poetry.’36 It is clear from his early poetry that, for Heaney, Frost provided perhaps the most crucial answer concerning poetry’s relationship to reality. In later phases, when Heaney begins exploring the redemptive possibilities of art in his prose, the spectacle of the poet staying against confusion remains critical to him because it encapsulates, in his own terms, how ‘the human spirit holds its own against [the world’s] affront and immensity.’37 Heaney’s ‘The Diviner’ springs from these kinds of Frost-inspired poetic ideals and bares strong resemblance to Frost’s canonical early poem ‘Mowing’. Like ‘The Diviner’, ‘Mowing’ writes to the tension at the heart of the poetic process. Frost finds a neat analogy for this duality in the land itself, as the poet-mower’s ‘scythe’ works ‘the hay’.38 The highly literary sonnet form is a conspicuous shape to choose for a depiction of ‘practical’ farming; yet, through the craftwork of language itself, Frost ends up uniting poetry and labour in the very act of seeming to separate them. As Richard Poirier argues in his long and incisive reading of ‘Mowing’, the ‘odd syntactical bareness’39 of the line ‘The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows’ transforms poetry into ‘fact’ in the ear of the listener. Ultimately, however, the ‘sound’ of the scythe and the poet’s sibilantly ‘whispered’ words become one, while the poem’s final image (‘left the hay to make’) offers a dignified portrait of the poet-as-labourer, something the young Heaney, who had travelled to Belfast to study literature from rural Derry, recognised immediately. In his own prose Heaney explains that his diviner ‘resembles the poet in his function of contacting what lies hidden, and in his ability to make palpable what was sensed or raised.’40 In Heaney’s poem, divining involves the interplay of faith and craft, of the practical and the poetic ways of

36  John Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p.22. 37  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, p.21. 38  RFCP, p.17. 39  Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.288. 40  ‘Feeling into Words’, P, p.48.

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sensing. As Frost enjoys how ‘Mowing’ ‘has a definition of poetry’41 written into it, Heaney explains in ‘Feeling into Words’ that he relishes ‘The Diviner’ ‘not for its own technique but for the image of technique contained in it.’42 From the opening lines of ‘The Diviner’, Heaney’s reflexive method is clear when ‘the arms of the V’43 turns letter into image with economy. The phrase in the tenth line ‘without a word’ echoes Frost’s whispering and its suggestions of a language comprised not of words but of something more innate and mysterious that circles ‘the terrain, hunting the pluck’. A parallel of Frost’s whispering scythe, Heaney’s hazel stick becomes an instrument through which nature broadcasts its secrets. The poem’s final image of ‘bystanders’ turned diviners—agnostics turned believers—encapsulates the faith-craft dichotomy that shapes much of Heaney’s poetic thinking. Echoing Frost’s conclusion in ‘Mowing’, Heaney’s poem ‘ends with a verb, “stirred”, the heart of mystery; and I am glad that “stirred” chimes with “word”, bringing together the two functions of vates into one sound.’44 Much as Frost describes in ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Heaney’s poem ‘runs a course of lucky events’ and ‘ends in a clarification of life’45 when the poet, like the diviners, has ‘believed the thing into existence.’46 In both poets’ work, then, rural craftwork reifies this vital relationship at the heart of the poetic act. Throughout Heaney’s early poems allusions to Frost are overt. Many of the successful poems submitted to The Group and those that were later collected in Death of a Naturalist share stylistic features with Frost’s poetry, and some even enter into conversations with specific Frost poems. Buxton has argued that Frost is behind the ‘hardened resignation’ and ‘clean craftedness’47 of ‘The Early Purges’ and ‘Mid-Term Break’ while the more direct dialogues between ‘Personal Helicon’ and ‘For Once, Then, Something’, and ‘Blackberry Picking’ and ‘After Apple-Picking’, led many early commentators to spot Frost’s influence. Frost is also strongly evoked by Heaney’s second collection Door into the Dark, a volume whose title

41  Reginald L. Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p.189. 42  ‘Feeling into Words’, P, p.48. 43  DN, p.36. 44  ‘Feeling into Words’, P, p.48. 45  Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Collected Prose, p.132. 46  Frost, ‘The Four Beliefs’, Collected Prose, p.145. 47  Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry, p.46.

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itself may allude to the American poet.48 ‘The Forge’—where Heaney uses the volume’s title phrase—and ‘The Thatcher’ build on the mode established by ‘Digging’ and ‘The Diviner’ in which poetic activity is paralleled with a rural trade as it is in many Frost poems, such as ‘Mowing’, ‘Mending Wall’, or ‘The Code’. In the craftwork poems of Heaney’s second volume, however, the poem’s need to ‘stay against confusion’49 becomes more urgent as the encroachment of modernity threatens the rural way of life. In ‘The Forge’, for instance, the blacksmith ‘recalls a clatter / Of hoofs where traffic is flashing’50 before returning to his work, depicting the products of his labour as both a mysterious gift to the world and a brittle anachronism. As Frost’s early poems reflect the loss of a nineteenth century rural way of life in industrialised America, Heaney’s poems correspondingly mourn the loss of rural craftwork on the brink of obsolescence in mid-twentieth century rural Ulster. The tangible loneliness of Frost’s characters in the North of Boston (1914) poems may have also resonated with Heaney politically, since he grew up in the aftermath of partition and in the predicament, shared by the large minority in Northern Ireland, of ‘[maintaining] a notion of myself as Irish in a province that insists that it is British.’51 Though he describes this ‘aggravated young Catholic male part’ of his identity as ‘underground’52 in this earlier phase, Heaney’s method of submerging ambivalent feelings beneath ostensibly simple rural dramas connects him to Frost, who hid his deceptively sophisticated anti-­ Modernism through a comparable (and very knowing) use of a Virgilian pastoral mode. Heaney’s invocations of Frost in the ‘The Wife’s Tale’, however, have been the subject of some negative criticism. In the opening lines of the poem, Heaney begins to develop the possibilities of dialogue, albeit with limited success: ‘I declare a woman could lay out a field Though boys like us have little call for cloths.’ He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup 48  Heaney’s volume may well derive from Frost’s ‘Door in the Dark’ which begins ‘In going from room to room in the dark, / I reached out blindly to save my face.’ RFCP, p.265. 49  Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Collected Prose, p.132. 50  DD, p.19. 51  ‘Belfast’, P, p.35. 52  Interview with Seamus Deane, ‘Unhappy and at Home’, The Crane Bag, Spring, 1977, p.61.

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And buttered the thick slices that he likes. ‘It’s threshing better than I thought, and mind It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look.’ Always this inspection has to be made Even when I don’t know what to look for.53

Clearly indebted to poems like ‘A Servant to Servants’, Heaney himself has acknowledged that he modelled his dialogue here directly on Frost’s example (something he admits to very rarely).54 Questioned on the subject of his gender politics by O’Driscoll, Heaney claims that he would ‘stand by’ some of his depictions of women in Door into the Dark, adding that ‘The Wife’s Tale’ ‘gets something right about man/woman companionship and contesting.’55 The poem suffers, however, from both stylistic and ideological problems, as Corcoran notes in his early study where he offers the following critical response: [w]hen Heaney speaks as a woman […] it still seems very much his own voice doing the talking […] The wife in ‘The Wife’s Tale’ would talk like this […] if she were Seamus Heaney; and she would talk like this […] if she were Seamus Heaney imitating Robert Frost. That sudden veering of this presumably Irish wife’s voice into the North of Boston accents of one of Frost’s women is perhaps a technical sign of the poem’s failure of empathy[.]56

For all Heaney was able to learn from Frost, then, poems such as ‘The Wife’s Tale’ demonstrate the limits of writing within the contours of the older poet. In later phases, as we shall see throughout this study, Frost retains his place as a key influence on Heaney, though his example is brought into finer balance with other models. ‘Station Island’ may be one intriguing instance of this process. After his many encounters with dead relatives, friends, and artists in the poem’s narrative, Heaney, the ‘convalescent’, emerges and takes ‘the hand’57 of a figure widely read as Joyce. Interestingly, the Joyce figure in ‘Station Island’ is described as ‘cunning, narcotic,

 DD, p.27.  Heaney, ‘Threshold and Floor’, Metre, Vol. 7, No. 8 (Spring-Summer 2000), p.266. 55  SS, pp.312–13. 56  Corcoran 1986, Seamus Heaney, p.57. 57  SI, p.92. 53 54

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mimic, definite’;58 Heaney defines Frost as the embodiment of ‘charm, intelligence, decoy—and I think that’s very good equipment for a poet to have.’59 In the closing images of ‘Station Island’ there are faint echoes of Frost’s inspiring images of poetic technique in ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’. In the poem, Heaney is advised by the unnamed figure to ‘strike’ his ‘note’ as he emerges ‘free into space / alone with nothing I had not known / already’60 as a ‘shower broke in a cloudburst’;61 Frost describes inspiration as the impulse to ‘strike a line of purpose’ through experience ‘in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew’ while ‘in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from a cloud’.62 Given Heaney’s early fixation with Frost and his admiration of his ‘teacherly quality’,63 one wonders whether these are deliberate evocations or if they should be taken instead as evidence of a profound symmetry in Frost and Heaney’s poetic thinking about inspiration. Either way, ‘Station Island’ shows how Heaney and Frost’s achievements grew more interlinked over time, even as the surface similarities became less overt. As recently as 2016, Helen Vendler recalls that Heaney ‘surprisingly’64 revealed to her that Frost was his favourite poet. Having few closer confidants or critical observers, Vendler’s surprise is indicative of a wider underestimation of Frost’s impact on Heaney’s work beyond the intertextualities of his 1960s poetry. Heaney’s later essay ‘Above the Brim: On Robert Frost’, written during his Oxford appointment but not collected in The Redress of Poetry (1995), indicates deep levels of connection between their poetry and thinking. Viewing Heaney’s total achievement today, it is fair to say that, as Dennison observes, it is the ‘idea of adequacy, of poetry as an ameliorative and restorative response to—adequation of—the inimical reality of life in the public domain, that proves most consistently central to Heaney’s developing poetics.’65 Frost’s image of the poem as a ‘stay against confusion’66 helps Heaney to conceptualise this dialectic and, as such,  SI, p.92.  SS, p.453. 60  SI, p.93. 61  SI, p.94. 62  Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Collected Prose, p.132. 63  SS, p.453. 64  Helen Vendler, “Second Thoughts & Coda: Tell the truth. Do not be afraid’, Irish Pages Vol. 8, No. 2, Heaney, 2014, p.15. 65  Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, p.4. 66  Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Collected Prose, p.132. 58 59

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Frost is not just an early stylistic exemplar but an influence on the critical formulations of poetry’s ‘rightness’67 that characterise Heaney’s later writings. While such pronouncements of poetry’s moral good have earned Heaney criticism as well as praise,68 Frostian concepts of art’s relation to the world repeatedly help him to frame his poetic (and political) theorisations in memorable prose that, much like his early poetry, speaks to the intense and complex nature of Frost’s influence.

ii Heaney’s experimentation with the elegiac form in the 1960s indicates the broader influence of American poetry on his early poetics. On numerous occasions Heaney has cited Frost’s ‘“Out, Out”’ as a particularly useful source when he set about writing on the subject of his own early experience of tragedy. Heaney recalls that his reading the poem in an undergraduate seminar was powerful, explaining ‘that kind of rural tragedy was familiar to me when I was growing up—and I suspect that the death in a road accident of my young brother Christopher predisposed me to the poem’.69 He remembers how the final ambiguous lines of the poem— ‘And they, since they // Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs’70— personally resonated with him and how ‘Lerner regarded this as a symptom of emotional callousness, but as far as I was concerned, it was the correct rendering of the fatalism and resignation, the slightly punch-drunk resolution, of the too-often assailed.’71 Heaney returned to the poem many years later in ‘Above the Brim’, emphasising its ‘documentary weight’, adding, ‘I did not mistake the wintry report of what happened at the end for the poet’s own callousness.’72 Heaney also collected the poem in The Rattle Bag (1982), the anthology he co-edited with Ted Hughes. In the 1960s, the effect of Frost’s poem on Heaney is clear in his uncollected ‘Amputation’, an early poem from his years at the Group.

 CP, p.467.  Dennison argues that Heaney sometimes tries to ‘advance a moral poetics under the less contentious, perhaps more respectable guise of formalism’, The Adequacy of Poetry, p.104. 69  See Buxton, p.45. 70  RFCP, p.137. 71  See Buxton, p.45. 72   Seamus Heaney, ‘Above the Brim: On Robert Frost.’, Salmagundi, No. 88/89 (1991), p.293. 67 68

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As Tyler Hoffman notes, in its choice of title, ‘“Out, Out”’ immediately ‘calls attention more obviously to its status as a borrowed text’.73 The Macbeth reference has the effect of raising ‘important questions […] even before reaching the body of the lyric as to how to hear the words spoken on the page.’ It is in this ambiguity that much of its emotional force is contained. Frost’s onomatopoeic phrasing effectively evokes the oppressively noisy industrial environment, foreshadowing the poem’s climax in which the razor seems ‘to leap’74 greedily at the boy’s hand. Indeed, the repetition of ‘snarled and rattled’75 in line seven creates a nursery-rhyme simplicity very much at odds with the bloody violence. Heaney would later exploit a similar opposition of sound and sense to great effect in ‘Mid-Term Break’, delivering his tragedy in childlike diction, much as Frost does when describing the death of the young child. The phrase ‘Little—less—nothing!’ is an effective mimetic device that cleverly recreates the failing heart-beat of the boy, a chilling demonstration of the ‘sound of sense’, while the answering phrase (‘that ended it’) diminishes the boy’s life to ‘it’, anticipating the muted response of the bystanders who, ‘since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs’. For Heaney, such resignation was the ‘correct rendering’76 of the emotions involved and gave the poem additional impact. As its title suggests, ‘Amputation’ has explicit thematic parallel with Frost’s poem and centres on an accident in an industrial environment.77 Formally, too, the poem recalls ‘“Out, Out”’ through its dependence on sound and texture to intensify its dramatic narrative. Heaney opens with the image of the injured man, echoing his vowels resourcefully. The description of the accident itself is particularly evocative of Frost’s unflinching depiction of violence, but the shift from quatrains to tercets, presumably to represent the lost limb, feels overworked in contrast to Frost’s 73  Tyler Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), p.116. 74  RFCP, p.136. 75  RFCP, p.136. 76  See Buxton, p.45. 77  ‘Amputation’ could also refer to Stewart Parker. Parker, who had his leg amputated while he was a 19-year old student, completed an undergraduate degree in English at Queen’s 1959–61 and attended Hobsbaum’s Group 1963–64 with Heaney. Although his amputation was to prevent the spread of a bone cancer known as Ewing’s Tumour, Marilynn Richtarik notes that stories of how Parker lost his limb abounded and made him ‘something of a celebrity on campus’. Richtarik, Stewart Parker: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.34.

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firmer control of pace and empathy. ‘Amputation’ is nonetheless a useful snapshot of Heaney’s apprenticeship in the mid-sixties where his ‘unabsorbed’78 influences, in Corcoran’s terms, are discernible. Heaney achieved the kind of authenticity he is straining for in ‘Amputation’ in ‘Mid-Term Break’, where he depicts the personal tragedy that, in his own words, made him ‘susceptible’ to elegies for ‘dead children’.79 ‘Mid-Term Break’ is still one of Heaney’s most widely-known poems; he would reference the loss of his young brother Christopher in many interviews and in the later poem, ‘Blackbird of Glanmore’, from his penultimate volume District and Circle (2006). In conversation with O’Driscoll Heaney recalls reading Ransom’s poetry at Group meetings, reflecting at this time that he was ‘very devoted to ‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter’ and ‘Dead Boy”’.80 ‘Dead Boy’ is included in The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (1954), an anthology Heaney appears to have owned at this time, while Heaney himself would eventually collect ‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter’ in The Rattle Bag. ‘Mid-­ Term Break’, first published by Kilkenny Magazine in 1963,81 bears many resemblances to the formal authority and emotional understatement of ‘Dead Boy’, suggesting that Ransom may have provided Heaney an important corroboration. The cold simplicity of Ransom’s title ‘Dead Boy’ suggests a subversion of elegiac conventions from the start. The first quatrain develops a flat tone, beginning with the declaration, ‘The little cousin is dead’.82 In contrast to Frost’s ‘“Out, Out”’, Ransom’s clean stanzas possess the formal polish and smoother texture Heaney would incorporate in ‘Mid-Term Break’. Similarly, though the voice retains some flexibility to convey the contradictory emotions of the speaker, the delivery is not as conversational or as self-consciously narrated as Frost’s. Ransom’s poem also differs in how it gains control over the reader’s emotion. While Frost creates pathos by exhibiting the helplessness of the child doing the adult work of labour, Ransom focuses on the interiority of the speaker. In his own reading ‘Dead Boy’, Richard Gray argues the shifting ‘diction, metaphor, and metrical effect’ are an effort to portray the ambivalent emotions of the speaker’s  Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, p.47.  SS, p.427. 80  SS, p.75. 81  Heaney, ‘Mid-Term Break’, Kilkenny Magazine, 9 (Spring 1963), p.25. 82  John Crowe Ransom, Selected Poems (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1947), p.3. 78 79

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‘complex personality, who can love the dead boy yet recognise his frailty; regret his death but know his world was doomed in any case’.83 This aspect of the poem may have provided an important lesson for Heaney who, in ‘Mid-Term Break’, achieves emotional impact by highlighting the speaker’s subjective experience rather than the fatal accident itself, as he does in ‘Amputation’. For Ransom’s speaker confronting the child’s body, the physical details of family resemblance unobserved in life are magnified in a setting very like ‘Mid-Term Break’: The elder men have strode by the box of death To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round The bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!

Ransom’s depiction of the child’s ‘little’ corpse in his ‘box’—barely a coffin—is a particularly effective device and one that is especially like Heaney’s closing image in the later poem. ‘Mid-Term Break’ shows a similar sophistication in its control of the reader’s empathy. This is achieved through an effective use of a narrator’s perspective, through which we experience the child’s funeral. Much of the poem focuses on Heaney’s adjustment to what he describes as the ‘representative status’ of being ‘the eldest’, a ‘responsibility […] laid upon me almost formally the morning my brother Christopher was buried.’84 Driven ‘home’ from school by ‘neighbours’ and ‘embarrassed’ by his new role, Heaney meets his ‘father crying’85 on the porch, before he even enters the house. In contrast to the thick texture and dramatic action of ‘Amputation’, ‘Mid-Term Break’ achieves emotional force through flatness and restraint. Heaney’s depiction of a ‘baby’ who ‘cooed and laughed’86 approximates to many of the details in Ransom’s poem which feel incongruous to the elegiac form. In both poems, such devices maximise emotional impact and, in the case of ‘Mid-Term Break’ particularly, evoke the speaker’s unease in the solemn adult world he has newly entered. There is a Ransom-like plainness to Heaney’s concluding lines where the child is finally seen, ‘paler now’ without ‘gaudy scars’, showing only ‘a 83  Richard Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London and New  York: Longman, 1990), p.112. 84  Henri Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, Paris Review, 1997, web. 85  DN, p.28. 86  DN, p.28.

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poppy bruise on his left temple’.87 In contrast to the graphic imagery of ‘Amputation’, there is a lexical precision and a quieter formal authority possessed by ‘Mid-Term Break’ that would characterise Heaney’s later elegies. Indeed, the differences between drafts of the poem evidence this development, particularly when ‘an ambulance’ becomes ‘the ambulance’. As Crowder notes this ‘mere change from indefinite to definite article’ contributes significantly to the effectiveness of the poem as ‘the’ suggests ‘it is not just any ambulance; it is the one that brings home the dead body of his four-year-old brother Christopher’.88 This careful adjustment indicates the evolution of Heaney’s emotive skills by attention to detail, or, in Ransom’s terms, by ‘attention to the local particularity of [the poem’s] components.’89 The most obvious connection between Ransom’s ‘Dead Boy’ and ‘Mid-Term Break’ is the description of the child’s coffin as a ‘box’, a word that is repeated in Heaney’s moving final line: ‘A four foot box, a foot for every year’.90 In its painful conclusiveness and processional rhythm, the famous closing lines of ‘Mid-Term’ Break’ exemplify Ransom’s lesson that ‘the meter-and-meaning process is the organic act of poetry, and involves all its important characters.’91 While Thomas C. Foster argues the emotional restraint of ‘Mid-Term Break’ is indebted to ‘contemporary British and Irish verse’ in its use of ‘defensive, tight-lipped’92 understatement, the similarities between ‘Mid-term Break’ and Ransom’s ‘Dead Boy’—a poem Heaney claims he was ‘devoted to’—93 suggests that certain American poets might have played an equally important role in the forming of Heaney’s early elegiac voice.

iii Roethke’s significance to Heaney’s early poetry has also been generally underestimated in criticism. Though the major studies on Heaney’s work identify the American poet as a figure of some influence on Heaney’s childhood bucolic, Roethke is typically overshadowed in this category by  DN, p.28.  Ashby Bland Crowder, ‘Seamus Heaney’s Revisions for Death of a Naturalist’, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 19 No.2, 2015, p.102. 89  Ransom, ‘A Poem Nearly Anonymous’, in The World’s Body (New York, 1938), p.28. 90  DN, p.28. 91  Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1941), p.295. 92  Foster, Seamus Heaney (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1989), p.21. 93  SS, p.75. 87 88

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the better-known influences of Wordsworth and Frost. For instance, in an early study, Blake Morrison lists Roethke as one of twelve poets from the 1950s and ’60s who offer Heaney elements he can move ‘forward’ with ‘into a new domain’.94 The lack of more focussed critical readings of Roethke’s influence is despite the fact that Roethke has a clear role in ‘Bogland’, a prophetic early poem which uses Roethke’s ‘In Praise of Prairie’ to formulate an Irish consciousness in answer to the American frontier myth. Corcoran is one of a small group of critics who notes Roethke’s significance to ‘Bogland’, arguing that the ‘American pioneering spirit, which looks outwards and upwards, to fulfilment through movement, advance, exploration, openness and, of course, conquest, is countered by Heaney’s negative definition of Irish topographical experience’.95 Jonathan Allison and Elmer Kennedy-Andrews concur that ‘Bogland’ wishes to define itself ‘against’96 rather than in accordance with its American model, but in his more detailed comparative reading, Kennedy-Andrews adds that, though Heaney sets out ‘to counterpoint Irish and American cultural perspectives’, he ironically ‘finds himself probing deep transatlantic flows circulating between Ireland and America’:97 Heaney ‘in fact deconstructs rather than consolidates ideas of stable (Irish) identity and meaning.’98 Whether this final effect is deliberate or not, such a use of Roethke indicates a more intense engagement with American writing in this early phase than is typically supposed, and suggests that the links between Heaney and Roethke’s work deserve much further discussion. In his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, Heaney explains that he was preparing to teach an American literature class at Queen’s—one that he was covering for Michael Allen—and ‘had been reading about the frontier and the west as an important myth in the American consciousness’, so, in response, he ‘set up—or rather, laid down—the bog as an answering Irish  Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), p.15.  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p.19. 96  Jonathan Allison, ‘Beyond Gentility: A Note on Seamus Heaney and American Poetry’, Critical Survey Vol. 8, No. 2, (1996), p.181. Allison considers ‘Bogland’ alongside the work of Louis Simpson, a figure who Allison argues is of considerable importance to Heaney as well. 97  Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.68. 98  Ibid., p.67. 94 95

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myth.’99 Heaney stops short of acknowledging that ‘Bogland’ more specifically is an answering poem to Roethke’s ‘In Praise of Prairie’, but the conversation between the poems is unmistakable. Where Heaney’s ‘eye concedes to / Encroaching horizon’,100 Roethke’s horizons ‘have no strangeness to the eye, / Our feet are sometimes level with the sky’;101 bog that ‘keeps crusting / Between the sights of the sun’ contrasts with Roethke’s ‘field of barley spread beneath the sun’. The most significant textual correspondence is the final word of each poem: Roethke’s ‘feud we kept with space comes to an end’ neatly closes the poem by capitulating to the blank space of the page, whereas Heaney’s closing description of the bog as ‘bottomless’ implies the endless possibilities of the bog metaphor that he would soon discover. Heaney’s choice to position ‘Bogland’ as the final poem in Door into the Dark also means it is essentially the final poem before Heaney’s real journey to take up his first professional appointment in the US, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1970–71. Roethke, on the other hand, had absorbed the works of Joyce and Yeats and even visited Ireland in 1960, spending time on the island of Inishbofin with Richard Murphy, a poet who Heaney admired and wrote about in 1977.102 As a keen reader of Lowell in the 1960s, Heaney would undoubtedly have encountered the poem ‘For Theodore Roethke’ in Near the Ocean (1967) (a volume he called ‘one of the greatest collections of poems in the last fifty years’.)103 In the poem itself, Roethke’s poetic signature is inscribed with Lowell’s characteristic power into the waters of the earth itself, left ‘quickened with your name’.104 Memorable though this image is, in the description of Roethke as a poet made ‘Helpless’ and ‘elemental’ by his love of ‘nature’, Lowell corroborates the sense of Roethke as a talent sadly misdirected. This is a view of Roethke that became increasingly common in the years after his death. Roethke’s decline in critical favour can be attributed to The Anxiety of Influence (1973), where Harold Bloom gives an account of what he calls ‘late Roethke’, arguing that much of what Roethke ‘hoped’ was ‘late  Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, P, p.55.  DD, p.55. 101  Theodore Roethke, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p.12. 102  See Allan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p.265; Heaney, ‘The Poetry of Richard Murphy’, Irish University Review 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1977), pp.18–30. Richard Murphy: Special Issue. 103  James Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares Vol. 5, No. 3. 1979. p.16. 104  RLCP, p.396. 99

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Roethke’ was actually ‘the Yeats of The Tower and The Winding Stair, or ‘the Eliot of the Quartets’.105 Bloom continues: sorrowfully there is very little late Roethke that is late Roethke […] Of apophrades in its positive, revisionary sense, he gives us no instance; there are no passages in Yeats or Eliot, in Stevens or Whitman, that can strike us as having been written by Roethke[.]

Helen Vendler rehearses part of this argument and claims that Roethke in his later poems was ‘a ghost of himself’ and lived ‘out his life imitating Yeats in bad poems.’106 Even Heaney, who greatly admired Roethke, acknowledges this perception of him as a poet who is ‘destined to grudging notice because he echoed the voices of other poets’107 in ‘Canticles to the Earth’. Today, however, Roethke’s reputation appears to be undergoing something of a revival. A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (2021), a major publication edited by William Barillas, includes forty-four essays explicating individual poems from each of Roethke’s books and aims to ‘spur’ on more ‘scholarly efforts’108 in this direction. In his introduction to the volume, Barillas suggests several possible lines of inquiry that would deepen critical understanding of Roethke’s underappreciated influence: ‘Roethke’s Irish connections merit extended treatment, considering his deep engagement with the work of Yeats and his influence on Richard Murphy, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Elaine Feeney, and other poets.’109 For Heaney’s critics generally, Roethke has long been considered a border case, somewhere between a corroborating presence and an understudied influence. In The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2009), Hughes is mentioned thirteen times and Kavanagh sixteen compared to Roethke’s single mention. Michael Parker cites Roethke as an important figure during Heaney’s years at the Group in the 1960s, and even presents ‘Death of a Naturalist’ alongside Roethke’s ‘Moss-Gathering’—a poem 105  Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory if Poetry, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p.142. 106  Vendler, The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p.6. 107  ‘Canticles to the Earth’, P, p.194. 108  William Barillas, A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2021), p.23. 109  Ibid.

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from the greenhouse sequence of The Lost Son—to expose their shared themes and stylistic features. Parker then, however, quotes from a 1985 correspondence with Heaney in which he claims, ‘I don’t know that I was influenced’, Roethke merely ‘corroborated’ or ‘helped to trust’110 what was pre-existing. As this instance highlights, much of the lack of critical emphasis can be attributed to Heaney himself, who has been less vocal about his admiration for Roethke in interviews than other figures. There are only two references to Roethke in the index of Stepping Stones compared to fifty-two for Hughes and nineteen for Frost. Still, given the significance of Roethke’s role in Heaney’s first conceptions of nationhood in Door into the Dark, it is surprising that the level of comparative close reading applied to ‘Bogland’ and ‘In Praise of Prairie’ has not been extended into Heaney and Roethke’s other well-known poems, especially Roethke’s greenhouse sequence. When such a level of critical scrutiny is brought to bear on their wider poetry, many more intertextualities come to light. While not as overt as the direct counterpointing of ‘Bogland’, the connections to Roethke’s contemporaneous achievement in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark provide useful and substantial critical access points to Heaney’s early work, illuminating aspects of his poetics in this era that are often overlooked in the race to signpost the easier-to-spot shared images and stylings of Hughes, Kavanagh, or Frost. Heaney and Roethke’s shared values are as equally clear in their critical writings. Today, Heaney’s passionate critical defences of poetry’s efficacy are considered an essential element of his achievement. Roethke, who was also a university teacher, has a similar core understanding of verse as a defensive construct against the actual or, as a ‘stay against confusion.’111 In his essay ‘Some Remarks on Rhythm’, Roethke draws on Frost to articulate a poetic theory very similar to Heaney’s, one in which formal poetry takes on a quasi-moral dimension by becoming the human spirit’s means of holding its own against historical reality: [i]t’s nonsense, of course, to think that memorableness in poetry comes solely from rhetorical devices […] We all know that poetry is shot through with appeals to the unconsciousness, to the fear and desires that go far back into our childhood, into the imagination of the race.112  Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet, p.57.  Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Collected Prose, p.132. 112  Roethke, On The Poet and His Craft, edited Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1965), p.80. 110 111

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Compare this to a key passage from ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps: On Sylvia Plath’, collected in The Government of the Tongue (1988), where Heaney argues: I have mentioned before the poet’s need to get beyond ego […] when this happens, sound and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry individual utterance away upon a current stronger and deeper than the individual could have anticipated.113

The ideas articulated by each poet are clearly alike, depicting a shared ‘consciousness’ beyond that of the ‘individual’ accessible through poeticised language. Moreover, the vocabulary and prose-rhythms of each section are remarkably similar. In the same essay, for instance, Roethke notes ‘we find this primitiveness of the imagination cropping up in the most sophisticated poetry’,114 while Heaney claims he seeks a ‘language for poetry that tends to brood and breed, crop and cluster, with a texture of echo and implication, trawling the pool of the ear with a net of associations.’115 Elsewhere in his prose, Heaney’s descriptions of poetic technique also align with Roethke’s. Roethke defines rhythm as the ‘entire movement, the flow, the recurrence of stress and unstress that is related to rhythms of the blood, the rhythms of nature’, adding that it ‘involves certainly stress, time, pitch, the texture of words, the total meaning’116 while Heaney argues that technique: involves not only the poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm, and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality.117

In ‘Canticles to the Earth’, Heaney makes it clear he sees these ideals embodied by Roethke’s achievement, ‘whatever else’ it ‘may have lacked’,118 and holds Roethke ‘outside movements and generations’.119  Heaney, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.148.  Roethke, On the Poet and His Craft, p.81. 115  Heaney, ‘The Fire I’ the Flint’, P, p.83. 116  Roethke, On the Poet and his Craft, p.78. 117  Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, P, p.47. 118  Heaney, ‘Canticles to the Earth’, P, p.190. 119  Ibid., p.194. 113 114

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Most significantly, Heaney recognises that Roethke’s verse is underpinned by a shared belief in formal verse as the ‘considerable human achievement’,120 something that leads him to anoint Roethke’s poetry as a mode of ‘staying the confusion and fencing off emptiness.’121 The shared sense of verse as a defence against a threatening reality articulated by both poets in their prose is exemplified by Roethke’s ‘Big Wind’, a poem from his greenhouse sequence. In the poem itself, the greenhouse (and the poetic imagination of which it is symbolic) both resist the external threat posed by the storm through creative ingenuity. Beginning in a dreamlike tone, the child speaker wonders aloud: Where were the greenhouses going, Lunging into the lashing Wind driving water So far down the river All the faucets stopped?—122

Roethke endangers the symbolic greenhouses by encoding their vulnerability into the language itself, offsetting the repeated soft consonants in the first line with the harshness of ‘Lunging’ and ‘lashing’. The opening sentence also establishes an unusual use of the past tense in a sequence otherwise devoted to capturing immediacy, a subversion Richard Allen Blessing notes as crucial to the effectiveness of the poem. Blessing defines the use of such a mode as a ‘strategy which allows [Roethke] to give order and meaning to the events of the night.’123 The countermeasures taken to defend against the storm listed from the sixth line on are in a correspondingly modulated language and follow ‘…stopped?—/ So’, an enjambment that visually marks the dialectic on the page. In answer to the excesses of the storm, the human activity is rendered in an orderly description. The efforts to protect the greenhouse take the form of reliance on machinery, just as Roethke depends on his poetic tools of rhythm and texture to bring order to chaos and stave off the existential threat represented by the wind. The greenhouse’s symbolic status is reinforced in the concluding lines where its physical limits are  Roethke, On the Poet and his Craft, p.44.  Heaney, ‘Canticles to the Earth’, P, p.19. Emphasis added. 122  Roethke, Collected Poems, p.39. 123  Richard Allen Blessing, Theodore Roethke’s Dynamic Vision (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1974), p.78. 120 121

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transcended in renewed poetic language. The speaker describes how the greenhouse ‘hove’ and went on ‘ploughing’ and ‘bucking’ to survive the storm, eventually transforming into a vessel that ‘sailed until the calm morning, / Carrying her full cargo of roses.’ Roethke, it appears, puts his greenhouse in jeopardy only to strengthen its power through this survivalist drama. Indeed, the image of the sailing greenhouse calls to mind Heaney’s elevated description of poetic form’s indispensability, both ‘the ship and the anchor […] at once a buoyancy and a holding’.124 ‘Big Wind’ shares many features with Heaney’s ‘Storm on the Island’, an early poem that highlights this shared sense of poetry’s relationship to reality. Like Roethke’s speaker, Heaney’s listens to the ‘tragic chorus in a gale’ as wind ‘pummels’ his ‘house’.125 Again, the reflexivity of the image is made clear in the opening lines where the phrase ‘We are prepared: we build our houses squat’ highlights the sense in which poem and ‘house’, metre and brick, are one. Just as Roethke’s speaker turns to practical measures to defend against the storm, Heaney determines to ‘Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate’, a line where, again, through effective consonance and metrical regularity, the poem itself becomes the well-­ made structure in which the speaker shelters. In the final lines, Heaney emphasises the shared dialectic when ‘wind dives / And strafes invisibly’ while he is ‘bombarded by the empty air’ before declaring: ‘it is a huge nothing that we fear.’ In both poems, then, it is the text’s internal economy of metaphor, texture, and rhythmical vigour that ensures its survival against the annihilating ‘nothing’. Though Heaney would develop more subtle and sophisticated forms of reflexivity in his verse, ‘Storm on the Island’ serves as a useful example of his early devotion to his aesthetic ideal and, to use the terms he applies to Roethke, his commitment to ‘fencing off emptiness’126 through formal verse. These similarities highlight a deeper connection between Heaney and Roethke than is usually acknowledged. For Heaney, Roethke’s poems of ‘childhood and death’ are his ‘best work’.127 Roethke’s descriptions of crafting the greenhouse sequence, and his honest accounts of how difficult the process was, highlight significant parallels with Heaney’s child’s-eye pastoral, usually considered in relation  CP, p.466.  DN, p.51. 126  Heaney, ‘Canticles to the Earth’, P, p.19. 127  Heaney, ‘Canticles to the Earth’, P, p.191. 124 125

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to Wordsworth. Roethke relates how his grandfather and his sons came to Michigan from Prussia in 1870 and began greenhouses that grew to be ‘the most extensive in that part of America.’128 For the young Roethke, they were ‘both heaven and hell’, a place ‘where austere German-Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful.’129 Recalling how he wanted to write a sequence of poems set in the greenhouses that told of experiences ‘at once literal and symbolical’,130 Roethke elaborates: I began a series of longer pieces which try in their rhythms, to catch the movement of the mind itself, to trace the spiritual history of a protagonist (not ‘I’ personally but of all haunted and harried men); to make this sequence a true and not arbitrary order which would permit many ranges of feeling, including humour.131

Roethke admits he found the task of creating ‘a reality, a verisimilitude, the “as if” of the child’s world, in language a child would use’ to be ‘enormously difficult’,132 and one that necessitated the development of new ‘technical devices’ like ‘rapidly shifting metaphor’ to allow moods to come and go ‘as in music’.133 Heaney’s corresponding devotion to capturing the child’s psychology is a key factor that distinguishes his pastoral from Frost’s rural trade poems, Kavanagh’s farming, or Hughes’s animal portraits. For this reason, Roethke’s ‘Moss-Gathering’ has been flagged in commentaries for its similarity to Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’.134 The child speaker in ‘Moss-Gathering’ undergoes a partial revelation (like the ones made in several of Heaney’s early poems) where the speaker begins to see himself as belonging vaguely to a cycle of nature that confuses and h ­ orrifies  Roethke, On the Poet and his Craft, p.7.  Ibid., p.8–9. 130  Ibid., p.36. 131  Ibid., p.10. 132  Ibid. 133  Ibid., p.12. 134  Longley, in Poetry and Posterity (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000), p.274, remarks Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist nature poems are ‘at home’ in Roethke’s world and points to ‘Moss-Gathering’ to make this case; Hart, Seamus Heaney Poet of Contrary Progressions, p.26, also notes ‘Moss-Gathering’ as a probable source for ‘Blackberry-Picking’ and ‘Death of a Naturalist’ while Parker, as discussed in main text, directly compares ‘Moss-Gathering’ with ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in Making of the Poet, p.57. 128 129

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him. Loosening moss ‘with all ten fingers’,135 moss-gathering is, like Heaney’s digging, ‘a sexual metaphor, an emblem of initiation, like putting your hand into the bush and robbing the nest, one of the various analogies for uncovering and touching the hidden thing.’136 The relish with which the child describes the activity is undercut in line seven by the feeling ‘something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets’.137 For Heaney’s readers, the image is likely to recall both the child’s disappointment at the ‘rat-grey fungus’138 in the concluding lines of ‘Blackberry-Picking’ and the more overtly sexual horror experienced by the child in ‘Death of a Naturalist’. Roethke’s guilt and fear of reprise for disrupting ‘some rhythm, old and of vast importance’ is echoed by Heaney’s fear of ‘The great slime kings’ in ‘Death of a Naturalist’, gathered to take ‘vengeance’ for the earlier robbery of ‘jampotfuls of the jellied / Specks’ from the ‘flax-dam’: Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.139

Here there is a discovery and horror told from a child’s-eye perspective that echoes Roethke’s ‘Moss-Gathering’, with a similar emphasis on the shame felt for the ‘desecration’. Though Heaney’s tighter lyrical structure is clear, the comparison highlights once again the similarities between each poet’s voice, imagery, and stylistic mannerisms. The echoes of Roethke’s ‘Root Cellar’ in Heaney’s ‘The Barn’ are equally striking. In Roethke’s poem, a childlike diction is used to depict the speaker’s experience in the ‘dark’ cellar, as ‘dank as a ditch’, where ‘Shoots dangled and drooped’.140 Heaney’s barn is an equivalent setting. While Roethke’s child observes ‘Bulbs’ breaking ‘out of boxes’ and ‘hunting for chinks in the dark’, Heaney’s discovers ‘an armoury / Of farmyard implements’ that become ‘bright objects’141 as his eyes adjust to low light;  Roethke, Collected Poems, p.38.  Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, P, p.42. 137  Roethke, Collected Poems, p.38. 138  DN, p.20. 139  DN, p.16. 140  Roethke, Collected Poems, p.36. 141  DN, p.17. 135 136

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Roethke depicts the shoots of plants ‘with long evil necks, like tropical snakes’ while Heaney transforms ‘two-lugged sacks’ to ‘great blind rats.’ Heaney, it seems, was also committed to mastering the challenge Roethke outlines in his prose: capturing ‘the spring and rush of’ experience in short lyrics ‘written from the viewpoint of a very small child: all interior drama; no commitment; no interpretation.’142 Heaney’s ability to convey the psychology of a child character in short, accessible lyrics is in large part what allows Death of a Naturalist to go beyond the simplistic idealisation of rural landscapes or the celebration of craftspeople. Indeed, these most Roethke-like of Heaney’s early poems are the ones that continue to populate school reading lists to this day and define what we now consider the early Heaney voice. Heaney’s and Roethke’s treatment of the father figure is another area of rich comparison. Contemplation of patriarchal continuity is what helps Heaney formulate his poetic self in ‘Digging’, a poem that shares features with Roethke’s ‘Old Florist’. Roethke’s depiction of the father is similar to that of another early Heaney poem, ‘Follower’, where the child is in the ‘shadow’ of the ‘expert’143 father who performs impressive displays around the farm. Indeed, in his Stepping Stones interviews, Heaney describes the ‘trudging’ nature of ‘Digging’ and ‘trimmer’ style of ‘Follower’ as symptomatic of a formal double-mindedness he shares with Roethke.144 Though Roethke’s ‘Old Florist’ is more deeply rooted in the child’s perspective than ‘Digging’, the poems share many notable similarities. In ‘Old Florist’, the father is depicted as a tireless labourer and described in a manner that recalls the leech-gatherer from ‘Resolution and Independence’ by Wordsworth. In ‘Old Florist’ Roethke’s father is imagined ‘pinching-back asters’ and ‘planting azaleas’ or ‘Tamping and stamping dirt into pots’.145 The word ‘or’ recurs seven times in the poem’s ten lines, underscoring the seeming endlessness of the father’s work. Like much of Heaney’s early poetry, there is thick texture here that makes the language overtly masculine, as the father chooses to ‘pick or flick / Rotten leaves’ or ‘make the dust buzz’. While there is no suggestion of physical abuse in Heaney’s depictions of his father (as there is in Roethke’s ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ and ‘The Saginaw Song’), examining the child’s view of the father figure was a  Roethke, On the Poet and his Craft, p.41.  DN, p.24. 144  SS, p.85. 145  Roethke, Collected Poems, p.40. 142 143

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chief concern in several of his early poems, not just in ‘Digging’ or ‘Follower’ but in the uncollected ‘Boy Driving his father to Confession’, drafted in the back pages of a university notebook, where he catalogues episodes where he has seen his father vulnerable, the ‘chinks in the paternal mail’.146 Though in the 1970s Heaney’s poems grew more socially engaged than Roethke’s, in this early phase it is easy to imagine a young Heaney responding to Roethke’s poetry as John Wilson Foster imagines him reacting to Hughes’s: ‘“so this is poetry! I think I can do that”.’147 Heaney’s use of Roethke in ‘Bogland’, where he drills ‘Inwards and downwards’ to the bog underfoot, bares out Longley’s image of a ‘ground of reciprocities’148 between Heaney and America with spectacular consequences for Heaney’s poetry. Those who remain unconvinced of Roethke’s influence will point to Heaney’s qualified and infrequent endorsements of the American poet’s work compared to his other exemplars, but, as Michael Cavanagh notes in his broad study of Heaney’s prose, it should be remembered that Heaney often ‘softens the direct connection’ between poets ‘by insisting on unconscious intellectual formation’149 so that they become, ‘like him, unconscious inheritors.’150 In his early review of Roethke’s poetry, Heaney describes him as an echoer of other poets and yet ‘outside movements and generations’151 in precisely the manner Cavanagh describes. Given this trend in Heaney’s thinking and in his discussions of Roethke, it is difficult to estimate how much Heaney took from his work; whether one should see these intertextualities as evidence of influence, or of an ‘unconscious’ inheritance brought about by shared values. Nevertheless, comparison with Roethke serves to open some of the most effective elements in Heaney’s early poems and highlight his differences from his British and Irish contemporaries. With Roethke, Heaney shares a Frostian sense of 146  ‘Boy Driving his Father to Confession’, listed as MS1/204/13/35 in Belfast Creative Group Manuscripts 1963–66, The McClay Library Special Collections, MS/1/204; Heaney Manuscript Collection, MS20/7/1/2, listed as ‘Notebook ‘English Fourth Honours: Modern Literature”, Special Collections, The McClay Library, Queen’s University, Belfast. 147  John Wilson Foster, ‘Fraught Pleasures: Engaging Seamus Heaney’, The Irish Review, Cork, No. 49/50, (Winter-Spring 2014/2015), p.123. 148  Longley, Poetry and Posterity, p.249. 149  Michael Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2009), p.26. 150  Ibid., p.28. 151  ‘Canticles to the Earth’, P, p.194.

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formal verse as a ‘stay against confusion’,152 the child’s psychological grammar, and the patriarchal conceptions of self that make his first two volumes successful, despite their limitations. As we shall see later in this study, Heaney’s developments largely consolidate the formal principles that were ‘deeply laid down’153 in him by his American influences in the 1960s, underlining the fact that American poets were critical to his discovery of his original voice. To observe Heaney’s engagements with American models in this first phase is to see him at his most limited, but also at his least self-conscious, at the stage Eliot describes: [a] very young man, who is himself stirred to write, is not primarily critical or even widely appreciative. He is looking for masters who will elicit his consciousness of what he wants to say himself, of the kind of poetry that is in him to write. The taste of an adolescent writer is intense, but narrow: it is determined by personal needs.154

Ultimately, Frost, Ransom, and Roethke each spoke to Heaney’s ‘personal needs’: they possessed the ‘truth to life’ he says he sought in the beginning, influencing not just his first poetry but his first conception of poetry as ‘an upfront representation of the world’, a world that poetry must always stand ‘its ground against.’155

 Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, Collected Prose, p.132.  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, p.21. 154  T. S. Eliot, ‘Yeats’ in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p.248. 155  CP, p.450. 152 153

CHAPTER 3

California 1970–1971

Heaney’s critics have long felt that his 1970–71 residency as visiting lecturer in the University of California, Berkeley, was highly significant to his poetic development. The crossing was orchestrated by Tom Parkinson, a Yeats scholar at Berkeley and friend of John Montague’s whom Heaney met at a poetry reading in the University of York.1 Despite early assessments of Wintering Out (1972) as disappointing in its lack of risk-taking,2 later commentary was more favourable, and argued for the influence of the contemporary American poetry Heaney was exposed to in California. Generally, critics suggest Heaney’s Berkeley residency functioned in two ways: to liberate him from constraining Anglo-Irish formalism and to increase the political engagement of his verse. Michael Parker’s assertion that ‘Heaney’s work during the period in which the poems of Wintering Out were being composed was deeply affected by political and literary experiences in the United States’3 is in line with the arguments of Henry Hart, Michael Allen, and Jonathan Allison, all of whom published commentary on Heaney’s Berkeley residency in the 1990s. The poets most often cited as formal exemplars are Gary Snyder and Robert Bly, the  SS, p.136.  Seamus Deane wrote that the poems of Wintering Out ‘express no politics’. ‘The Appetites of Gravity’, Sewanee Review, Winter 1976, p.203. 3  Michael Parker, ‘Gleanings, Leavings: Irish and American influences on Seamus Heaney’s Wintering Out, 1972’, New Hibernia Review Vol. 2, No. 3, 1998, p.16. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7_3

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latter of whom is usually invoked in discussions of the prose collection Stations (1975) which, like Wintering Out, was begun in California but not published until four years later. Heaney remains a strong corroborating presence in critical readings of his work, and this is especially true for the California narrative, which relies heavily on Heaney’s interview comments. While it is of course necessary to probe the significance of Heaney’s residency, the critical tendency to overemphasise the formative nature of his California year has caused the continuities of Wintering Out and Stations to be overlooked and has done little to further our understanding of his complex relationship with American poetry. When considered in the broader view of Heaney’s American influences, the Berkeley period is more useful for highlighting his resistance to certain forms of US poetry due to the critical-literary values he had already absorbed. Much commentary regarding the impact of America on Heaney’s poetry during 1970–71 has focussed on ‘Westering’, the final poem in Wintering Out, for its references to the California context. Subtitled ‘In California’, the poem begins cinematically: I sit under Rand McNally’s ‘Official Map of the Moon’— The colour of frogskin,4

Evoking the cosmic possibilities suggested by the recent moon landing, this image of Heaney in California has seduced even some of his sharpest critics. Allen argues that the speaker of the poem ‘is on his way to a residency at Berkeley, and the style of the poem, under the influence of Gary Snyder, is relaxed, narrative and associative rather than cryptically linguistic.’5 This reading of Heaney’s American influences has been influenced in large part by Heaney himself, who was often asked about his early Berkeley year in later interviews when his American reputation was in the ascendance. Other critics, noting the poem’s focus on memories of ‘Good Friday’ in ‘Donegal’, have sensed Heaney’s ambivalence for the American backdrop glimpsed in ‘Westering’. Parker argues that the poem depicts Heaney ‘[h]omesick in California’, comforting himself with ‘reassuring  WO, p.67.  Michael Allen, ‘The Parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969–1987’, Michael Allen, Close Readings: Essays on Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2015) p.126. 4 5

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memories’6 of Ireland, while Allison posits that the poem is indicative of the volume’s tendency to ‘see America through an Irish lens, or rather to assuage a sense of displacement by recalling the original place.’7 Sarah Bennett goes further, arguing that the poem’s images show Heaney’s ‘discomfort with distance’ and that in Wintering Out generally, ‘an academic year in California is reduced to a summer vacation, one that is not fully submitted to.’8 In his extremely well-researched examination of Heaney’s 1970–71 residency, Edward O’Shea makes a number of astute observations.9 Noting that ‘Berkeley had a history of welcoming Irishmen’—10 including Heaney’s contemporary John Montague—O’Shea argues that in the University of California a young Heaney found himself ‘at the very end of a distinguished roster of almost ninety Ph.D.  English faculty, many of whom are “household names” (in academia) today’.11 Heaney’s negotiated salary at the University of California was three times that of Queen’s in Belfast, and for this he ‘taught the standard load for someone at his rank, two courses per quarter’ plus ‘freshman composition.’12 Living a quarter of a mile from campus in an apartment on Carleton Street (which is now used as student housing) Heaney had enough free time to compose several poems that were later collected in Wintering Out, such as ‘Westering’, ‘Gifts of Rain’, ‘The Other Side’, ‘Servant Boy’, and ‘The Tollund Man’. These poems were drafted in what is now referred to as Heaney’s Bancroft notebook, archived in the Bancroft library of the University of California. Though clearly a productive time for Heaney, the poems he wrote in California do not lend much support to the claims of contemporary American influence. Contrary to the prevailing critical argument around his poetry in this era, Heaney was at this stage of his development already a confident formalist and was rather settled in his  Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993), p.113.  Jonathan Allison, ‘Beyond Gentility: A Note on Seamus Heaney and American Poetry’, Critical Survey Vol. 8, No. 2, 1996, pp.183–4. 8  Sarah Bennett, ‘America’, Seamus Heaney in Context, edited by Geraldine Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p.51. 9  Edward O’Shea gave a workshop in Queen’s University, organised by Seamus Heaney HomePlace, titled ‘Seamus Heaney’s Idea of America’, 14 February, 2019, in which he discussed many of the ideas that appear in the article discussed in main text. 10  Edward O’Shea, ‘Seamus Heaney at Berkeley, 1970–71’, Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Summer 2016), p.161. 11  Ibid., p.162. 12  Ibid., p.165. 6 7

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convictions about modern poetry. O’Shea wisely cautions against taking the formative nature of the California year for granted: [t]he received wisdom, which Heaney at times seems to endorse, is that his immersion in American poetry did not take place until he got to California. But we should be wary of oversimplifying Heaney’s career too much into rigid time grids. California represents a time of consolidation of the American experience for Heaney, rather than a rupture.13

As O’Shea intimates here, the longstanding critical insistence on Berkeley’s formative impact overlooks Heaney’s ‘American experience’ in Belfast, and risks simplifying the matter it aims to explore. The argument for California’s significance to Heaney is in large part rooted in comments he made in a 1979 interview with James Randall: [t]he year 1970–71 I spent in Berkeley and that was also a releasing thing […] I became very conscious of the poetry of Gary Snyder. I saw Snyder; and Bly was living in Bolinas that year. He read a couple of times around the Bay Area. The whole atmosphere in Berkeley was politicized […] There was a strong sense of contemporary American poetry in the West with Robert Duncan and Bly and Gary Snyder rejecting the intellectual, ironical, sociological idiom of poetry and going for the mythological […] that meshed with my own concerns for I could see a close connection between the political and cultural assertions being made at that time by the minority in the north of Ireland and the protests and consciousness-raising that were going on in the Bay Area.14

Though Heaney does not explicitly credit Snyder or Bly with formal influence in this extract, his description of ‘a releasing’ function has led critics to understand the impact of West Coast poetry in formal terms, as a loosening agent on the verse line and stanza shape of Wintering Out and Stations. Heaney reinforces this interpretation in a 1988 interview with Randy Brandes, where he depicts his Berkeley residency as a project of self-­improvement, explaining the ‘venture to America was to encounter the other, to put the screws on my own aesthetic’ and ‘to encounter the other’.15 While the visual appearance of Wintering Out and Stations does  Ibid., p.168.  James Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1979, pp.19–20. 15  Randy Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, No. 80, 1988, p.16–17. 13 14

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indicate a stylistic refinement, the aesthetic principles that underpin Heaney’s poetic thinking did not undergo any large-scale transformation during this era, and he returned to Belfast without significant new exemplars. Snyder and Bly earn a name in most major Heaney studies, but there is rarely any place given to their poetry; yet it is worth considering some of their work alongside the poems of Wintering Out and Stations to highlight the important differences in their work and Heaney’s, and to better understand the reasons why Heaney could not use their examples in the way he could, for instance, Frost’s or Lowell’s. Snyder rose to prominence in the 1950s among a diverse group of young artists in San Francisco and was a significant figure in contemporary American poetry at the time of Heaney’s arrival in 1970. Heaney has remarked that he met Snyder and enjoyed his public readings, where he learned ‘to see the disposition of the verse on the page as a musical notation of sorts’.16 While Heaney appears to have come to terms with Snyder as a reader, his own poems from this era tell a different story. Even two of the more experimental nature poems in Wintering Out—‘Broagh’ and ‘Gifts of Rain’—show his reluctance to embrace a comparable poetics. ‘Piute Creek’ is typical of Snyder’s naturism, and yet in both form and sentiment it diverges profoundly from ‘Broagh’, the most discussed poem of the acclaimed place name sequence in Wintering Out. In ‘Piute Creek’, Snyder abandons ‘Words and books’ and ‘All the junk that goes with being human’ to access the ideal, unmediated experience of nature, which he itemises in Whitmanian fashion (‘Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted’).17 By contrast, ‘Broagh’ accesses nature by drilling into etymology. Enshrining the place name itself as an emblem of ethnic cross-fertilisation (that last / gh the strangers found / hard to manage’),18 Heaney suggests in ‘Broagh’ that Ulster politics ‘might finally derive from a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary’,19 as he later argues in his prose. As Bernard O’Donoghue argues in his long reading of the poem, the word ‘Broagh’ embodies ‘the full Northern Irish linguistic complex’,20  SS, p.146.  Gary Snyder, ‘Piute Creek’, A Range of Poems, (London: Fulcrum Press, 1967), p.13. 18  WO, p.17. 19  CP, p.461. 20  Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry, (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p.63. O’Donoghue corrects John Wilson Foster’s early misreading of the poem, arguing ‘Heaney’s point is precisely that for the native Irish sound (as 16 17

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drawing on all its inheritances to create a name that emblematises inclusion. In ‘Broagh’, then, Heaney is using the very thing that in Snyder’s view impedes experience—language—as a paradigm for local reconciliation. Far from exhibiting signs of the loosening California spirit, ‘Broagh’ instead resembles a technical exercise and points back to the conscientious study of the English Language Heaney’s Queen’s undergraduate notebooks reveal. Holding on to ‘Words and books’ tightly, ‘Broagh’ cannot share in Snyder’s easy dismissal of ‘the junk that goes with being human’, since the gh of ‘Broagh’ represents what Heaney describes in his prose as a ‘pure vocable’, an ‘articulate noise’ that underscores the fact that words are an ‘etymological occurrence [and] symptom of human history, memory and attachments.’21 Snyder’s effort to strip language bare of its human signature to access a purer experience of nature is therefore, in Heaney’s thinking, doomed by its own method. The closing phrases of each poem distil this clash of sensibilities: while Snyder’s speaker is ready to ‘rise and go’ freely into nature, Heaney’s phrase ‘hard to manage’ reads as a commentary on what has been an ambitious formal exercise. Certain poems of Wintering Out may owe something to the early influence of Edward Thomas. As Neil Corcoran intimates,22 Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’, where the word itself is at the poem’s imaginative centre, might have provided Heaney some corroboration when writing his own place-name poems: The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry[.]23

at the end of “Lough”), familiar locally “to Protestant and Catholic alike”, the Old English spelling system can offer only an approximation from within the resources of its own orthography […] The supplying of this non-native orthographic form is no help with the re-­creation of the pronunciation to which spelling, in its clumsy way, aspires’, p.64. 21  ‘Englands of the Mind’, P, p.150. Added emphasis. 22  Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p.44. 23  Edward Thomas, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), p.66.

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Thomas’s method of allowing the place-name to appear in the poem and act as a weight on the tongue, leading the poet towards epiphany, is mirrored by ‘Anahorish’ (‘Anahorish, soft gradient / of consonant, vowel-­ meadow’)24 and ‘Toome’ (‘My mouth holds round / the soft blastings,’).25 Heaney’s Wintering Out poems are notably more entranced and knowing than ‘Adlestrop’, which is tonally ‘warmer’,26 to use Heaney’s own description of Thomas’s poetry. Heaney tells O’Driscoll that Thomas’s example was ‘very important’27 to him when he was at Queen’s University; he then compares Thomas’s work to the shared influence of Frost, who developed a friendship with Thomas and wrote the poem ‘To E. T.’ in his honour.28 Longley, who Heaney recalls was writing about Thomas when they taught together on the Queen’s faculty, argues that Heaney’s early verse consciously ‘diverges’ from the examples of English nature poets, such as Thomas, who incline to ‘Protestant religious structures or to (related) ‘naturalist’ enquiry.’29 Heaney’s place-name poems enact a new and perhaps even defiant level of independence from English nature writing by drilling into the Irish roots of words themselves in an effort to recover symbols of Northern Ireland’s unique inheritance, as in ‘Broagh’. Indeed, when reflecting on his time in America 1970–71, Heaney admits that when he ‘landed in California’ he was ‘wired up to English literature terminals’ and ‘still a creature of [his] undergraduate degree’; the American distance functioned, in his view, to give him a greater sense of ‘the whole Irish consequence.’30 Heaney often exhibits this ‘charged-up’31 sense of  WO, p.6.  WO, p.16. 26  SS, p.454. 27  SS, p.454. Heaney adds that Thomas ‘was influenced by Frost’ and that his own poem ‘Oracle’, published in Wintering Out, ‘is more Thomasy than Frosty’. Heaney may be acknowledging here that ‘Oracle’ shares an image of a boy hiding in trees with Frost’s early poem ‘Into my Own’. 28  Rachel Buxton notes that Frost became friends with Thomas while he was living in England for several years from 1912 and that it was ‘in part Thomas’s favourable reviews of Frost’s poetry which assured Frost’s positive reception in England’. She adds ‘just as Thomas was responsible for bringing Frost’s poetry to the attention of an English audience, so was Frost largely responsible for Thomas’s embarkation on a poetry-writing career.’ Rachel Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.51–52. 29  Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000), p.100. 30  SS, p.143. 31  SS, p.143. 24 25

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his Irishness by writing against English models, making Thomas’s submerged presence in the poems of Wintering Out, a collection more typically noted for its California backdrop, more likely than it might at first seem. Similar complex interplays of history and identity are at work in ‘Gifts of Rain’, a poem Heaney wrote in the Bancroft notebook during his year in California. While ‘Gifts of Rain’ appears to incorporate some of the formal features Heaney values in Snyder’s work, when compared to a poem of Snyder’s such as ‘Riprap’, which was widely anthologised at this time, many significant divergences become clear. In ‘Riprap’, Snyder’s ‘rocks’ and ‘words’ and ‘thoughts’ and ‘things’ are synthesised in an imitative form in which poetic lines are locked in place like the stone path itself.32 Such a deliberate use of shape recalls Olson’s assertion that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’33 in his highly influential ‘Projective Verse’, an essay Heaney read and which appeared in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography (1967), another writer he claimed he was ‘coming to grips with’34 in his 1979 interview with James Randall. Indeed, Williams’s famous phrase ‘no ideas / but in things’35 from ‘A Sort of Song’ is paraphrased in the final lines of ‘Riprap’: Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.36

Not only, then, do ‘thoughts’ begin in ‘things’, for Snyder the two enter a fluid relationship in which they are mutually defined. Yet for his commitment to this kind of formalism Snyder has faced criticism,37 and Heaney’s varied commentary on Snyder reflects this polarising quality. Though he 32  The title poem of Snyder’s 1959 collection is named after an innovated pathway Snyder describes as ‘a cobble of stones laid on steep slick rock to make a trail for horses in mountains’. Snyder, epigraph to Riprap (Kyoto, Japan, 1959). 33  Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, An Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions Publications, 1967), p.330. 34  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.20. 35   William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Volume II 1933–1962, edited by Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), p.55. 36  Snyder, ‘RipRap’, A Range of Poems, p.29. 37  Colin Falck argues ‘Snyder can be wearisome—and one begins to hear a Whitmanian cataloguing going on somewhere in the background—when he uses the kind of fragmented description and rhythmically invertebrate lay-out on the page that was first patented by

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has occasionally endorsed Snyder as an exemplar of a useful formal alterity, he has also remarked that he found Snyder’s work ‘too programmatic’38 and that, despite dedicating himself in California to seminal texts like Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’, he found it ‘a toil […] I could see what I ought to feel but I couldn’t really feel it.’39 It is worth pausing here to consider Heaney’s relationship to Carlos Williams, whose achievement is considered to be much more significant and influential in modern American poetry than either Snyder or Bly’s. Quoting Heaney’s interview with Randall, Parker argues the poems of Wintering Out are indebted to ‘the deep images and rhythms of William Carlos Williams.’ Parker adds: This is made immediately apparent in Wintering Out’s opening poem, ‘Fodder’, where W. C. Williams’s technique of setting curt ‘heavily stressed lines that thrust’ against ‘more lightly stressed lines that receive that thrust’ is effectively utilized. By offering Heaney alternatives to contemporary English practice, and the restrictedness of the Movement to which previously he had tended to be deferential, American models set up the potential for poetic and political transition.40

Parker is not alone in identifying Carlos Williams as an enabling figure. Blake Morrison had earlier noted Carlos Williams as a useful example to Heaney during his time in California,41 but Magdalena Kay, who is agnostic about several of the claimed American influences on Heaney, posits: ‘Heaney’s great admiration for William Carlos Williams is certainly worth mentioning, yet Williams’s short lines sound nothing like Heaney’s drill-­ like stanzas of the 1970s.’42 As Kay’s comment highlights, Carlos Williams’s significance to Heaney in this phase has more or less been taken at face value. When opened to further analysis, a far more mixed picture emerges. William Carlos Williams’. American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that Matters (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 141–142. 38  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.20. 39  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, p.17. 40  Parker, ‘Gleanings, Leavings: Irish and American Influences on Seamus Heaney’s “Wintering out,” 1972’, p.22. 41  Blake Morrison compared the poetry of Wintering Out with ‘William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley’, writers whom he notes Heaney read ‘while in California’, Seamus Heaney (London: Routledge, 1993) p.45. 42  Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for all Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012) p.131.

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In his 1979 interview with Randall, Heaney explains that he got a ‘release […] just by reading American poetry, in particular coming to grips with Carlos Williams.’ He adds that in Wintering Out there are signs of a corresponding ‘loosening’ and ‘more relaxed movement to the verse.’43 In his later conversation with Brandes, he explains he ‘knew Williams’ but he ‘wanted to know what he was about.’44 In the article ‘Threshold and Floor’, he portrays his Berkeley year as a mission of discovery: ‘I was lighting out for the territory of the Beats, of Projective verse and the variable foot’.45 Heaney may have been influenced in his view of Carlos Williams as an example he ought to get ‘to grips with’ in Berkeley by Geoffrey Moore, who describes Carlos Williams in The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (1954) as a ‘controversial’46 and ‘misunderstood’47 figure. Moore explains: Some English readers may find, as I did originally, that what Wallace Stevens called Williams’ ‘anti-poetic’ style is a barrier. Beyond this, however, there is a rich country and before deciding whether Williams has failed or not, it is necessary to meet him on his own ground.48

While he was never able to literally ‘meet’ Carlos Williams, as Montague had done earlier, Heaney immersed himself in Carlos Williams’s achievement when he was in California, where he says he ‘bought and read— almost as if I were taking a course—books such as A William Carlos Williams Reader’.49 In the end, however, he ‘held back’ and felt unable to ‘let go projectively’; though he came to ‘happy enough terms with Carlos Williams’,50 he ‘would sometimes wonder, “is this all?” I […] was almost afraid to concede that the so-called “poetry of a grown man” could be so

 Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.20.  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, p.16. 45  Heaney, ‘Threshold and Floor’, Metre, Vol. 7, No. 8, Spring-Summer 2000, p.266. 46  Geoffrey Moore, The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse, selected with an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Moore (London: Penguin, 1954), p.87; Heaney appears to have owned Moore’s anthology, see ‘Introduction’, note 78. 47  Ibid., p.86. 48  Ibid., p.87. 49  SS, p.145. 50  SS, p.145. 43 44

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open faced and child-arty.’51 These comments, made to O’Driscoll during the Stepping Stones interviews, echo remarks he made to Henri Cole in a 1997 interview where he admits that, though he ‘had a genuine curiosity about Williams and read him fairly systematically’ when he was in California, he ‘read him with affection but with puzzlement too’; ‘I kept looking and saying, is this all? And I came to realize that the answer was, yes, this is all.’52 Heaney’s identification of a ‘child-artiness’ in Carlos Williams is probably meant as no denigration since humour and novelty are intended elements of his poetry. In his autobiography, Williams recalls he ‘laughed out loud’ and ‘gaped along with the rest’ at the works in the Armory Show in New  York in 1913, such as ‘a “picture” in which an electric bulb kept going on and off; or Duchamp’s sculpture (by “Mott & Co.”), a magnificent cast-iron urinal, glistening of its white enamel’.53 As Richard Gray notes in his broad study of twentieth century American poetry, the arrival of the Armory Show was an ‘event of the first importance to the arts, including poetry’; it ‘was intended to deliver an educative shock’ and ‘to make Americans aware, whether they liked it or not, of what had been happening in European painting since Impressionism: movements like Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Pointillism’.54 The spectacle of the Armory show encouraged American writers, including Carlos Williams, ‘to continue their own individual explorations of rhythm and language’.55 The parallels between Carlos Williams’s pleased astonishment at the Armory Show works and the intended effects of his own poems, such as ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. Despite being one of the most famous poems of the era, the single sentence of ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ has been subject to multiple readings and critics continue to ask what it is, exactly, on which ‘so much depends’?56 It is easy to imagine those who were unfamiliar with Carlos Williams, including Heaney, reading poems such as ‘The Red

 SS, p.349.  Henri Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, Paris Review, 1997, web. 53  Williams, An Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, p.134. 54  Richard Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London and New  York: Longman, 1990), p.42. 55  Ibid., p.43. 56  Williams, The Collected Poems Volume I 1909–1939, edited by A.  Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000), p.224. 51 52

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Wheelbarrow’ and asking themselves, as Theodore Roosevelt is rumoured to have done at the Armory show, ‘But is it art? But is it art?’.57 One of the most defining elements of Carlos Williams’s achievement, as Heaney suggests in ‘Threshold and Floor’, is his invention of the variable foot. The variable foot is intended to turn poetry from being stress-timed and rule-based into something much freer and more flexible. Pace and emphasis are indicated by layout on the page, thus allowing for the speaker’s voice to, in a sense, become one with the poet’s. Such was Carlos Williams’s excitement with his invention that on one occasion he claimed: ‘I shall use no other form for the rest of my life, for it represents the culmination of all my striving after an escape from the restrictions of the verse of the past.’58 For his variable foot, Carlos Williams has received both praise and criticism, however. Echoing Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of American poetry as ‘fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose’,59 John Lennard writes of Carlos Williams: As geography and politics intertwine there is a sense of areas informing a republican and democratising poetics, conscientiously welcoming all people and phenomena, but for that reason also readily bereft and anxious about technique; like Hopkins with ‘sprung rhythm’, Williams tried to theorise himself neoclassically but his variable foot has similarly confusing and unnecessary results (feet in mouth, not metre).60

However, Lennard is not entirely dismissive of Carlos Williams’s experimentalism. Quoting Snodgrass’s re-lineation of Carlos Williams’s ‘Poem’ in De/Compositions: 101 good poems gone wrong (2001), Lennard argues that ‘Williams’s lines—however seemingly fragmentary—are shown to be in balance with themselves and in one another’.61 Heaney, it seems, shared this view, for, despite still wanting the line ‘to have back echo, to say a little beyond where it ended’,62 he was able to come to ‘happy enough terms’  See Ibid., p.42.  Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, edited with an introduction by John C. Thirlwall (New York: McDowell, Obolensky Inc.), p.334. 59  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, translated by Henry Reeve (London: Longman, 1862), p.70. 60  John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.169–70. 61  Ibid., p.171. 62  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, web. 57 58

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with Carlos Williams and credit his ear as ‘very delicate’,63 whatever else his achievement may have lacked. But what exactly, in Heaney’s view, was the missing element in Carlos Williams that pulled him away from the American poet and that made him ask, ‘“is this all?”’64 This question can be answered by attention to the narrow stanzas that originally led critics to suspect Carlos Williams’s influence on Heaney. Consider Wintering Out’s sixth poem, ‘Land’: I stepped it, perch by perch. Upbraiding rushes and grass I opened by right-of-way through old bottoms and sowed-out ground and gathered stones off the ploughing to raise a small cairn.65

In this description of the ‘sowed-out ground’ Heaney is experimenting with the shorter, lower-case lines that would characterise the bog poems of North. These lines, that Heaney would later call ‘drills’,66 are mimetic; they are narrowed and softened to give an impression of ‘drilling’ into the ground and into the very history that Carlos Williams is trying to ‘escape’67 through his variable foot. This difference in aims within the narrow stanza shape highlights a wider, more significant chasm: Carlos Williams’s poems do not practice the kind of allegory or myth-making that defines Heaney’s poetry from this period. Rather, Carlos Williams’s best-known poems ‘attend to the thing itself: its hacceitas or “this-ness”’,68 the principle which, as Gray notes, connects him to Imagism. When Heaney concludes of Williams ‘yes, this is all’,69 there may be an echo of Moore’s criticism of Hilda Doolittle, an Imagist poet who knew Williams personally. In his anthology Moore argues that it is this Imagist quality, ‘the lack of verbal and metaphorical richness, which makes much of her poetry, for all its clarity and sensitivity, seem not so much a poetry as a collection of pictures.’70  SS, p.145.  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, web. 65  WO, p.11. 66  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.16. 67  Williams, Selected Letters, p.334. 68  Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, p.82. 69  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, web. 70  Moore, The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse, p.110. 63 64

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Though today Carlos Williams’s achievement is considered more lasting than H. D.’s, one can infer from Heaney’s various comments about Carlos Williams that he felt similarly conflicted about his style of poetic project. The claimed traces of contemporary American poetry in the prose poems of Stations are similarly allusive. As in the case of Wintering Out, the critical discussion around the collection has evolved alongside Heaney’s interviews in which he cites Bly as another influential figure who he heard read in California 1970–71. In his chapter-length discussion of Stations, Hart argues for the importance of the California setting to Heaney’s use of the prose form and suggests the collection was written during a ‘critical juncture in [Heaney’s] career, when he was allowing his formalist training to absorb the Whitmanesque spirit of the sixties’, adding that the prose form itself ‘depends on the sort of freedom Heaney must have felt in California’.71 Hart rightly emphasises some of the significant differences between Heaney’s prose poetry and Bly’s, but more detailed examination of each poet’s aims within the prose form again reveals important distinctions and would thus serve to deepen our understanding of Heaney’s sense of American writing. In Bly’s work, the prose poem is a method by which the poet can access a new experience of nature, and one that allows him to appreciate nature’s independence from man. In the epigraph to his collection The Morning Glory (1975), Bly explains: there is the idea that our disasters come from letting nothing live for itself, from the longing we have to pull everything, even friends, into ourselves, and let nothing alone. If we examine a pine carefully, we see how independent it is from us. When we first sense that a pine tree doesn’t need us, that it has a physical life and a moral life and spiritual life that is complete without us, we feel alienated and depressed. The second time we feel it, we feel joyful.72

As this commentary suggests, Bly discovers in the prose form the freedom necessary to communicate the independence of nature in a way that would not be possible in traditional formal verse, since it imposes manmade structures that ultimately change what is being described. Heaney’s Stations does not share the same values. 71  Henry Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions, (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), p.100. 72  Robert Bly, Preface, The Morning Glory (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

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Bly’s ‘Sunset at a Lake’ is exemplary of his desire to restore freedom to nature. The poem, which begins with the plain statement ‘The Sun is sinking’,73 makes effective use of traditional alliterative (‘ducks drift’), assonantal (‘small weeds stand abandoned’), and sibilant (‘silver’, ‘something’, ‘slowly’, ‘shore’) devices to paint the scene, but, with no human presence cluttering the picture, there is a sense of the poet as a blank canvas on which an unspoiled nature can be faithfully transposed. In the image of ‘the darkening roof of earth’ and the ‘abandoned’ weeds, there is a sense of nature reclaiming itself from man. Heaney’s prose poem ‘Nesting-Ground’ utilises many of the same traditional poetic devices as Bly’s but does so to quite different effect, reinforcing its title’s suggestions of incubation in contrast to the panorama implied by Bly’s. Sibilance is deployed effectively throughout, with the first use in ‘sandmartins’ nests’74 becoming reinforced a line later by the isolated ‘sleeved and straightened’. Heaney’s characteristic fondness for aural contrast is also on display, with the harsh consonants in ‘cold prick’ working against the soft, drawn-out vowel sounds of ‘claw’ and ‘gazed’, bookending the internally rhymed ‘surprising density of its tiny beak’. The onomatopoeic ‘cheeping’ of the birds and the cluster of assonance created by ‘he stood sentry, gazing, waiting’ leaves ‘Nesting-Ground’ feeling like it is firmly within the bounds of the early Heaney aesthetic, despite the adoption of a new form. The most significant contrast between ‘Nesting-Ground’ and ‘Sunset at a Lake’ is Heaney’s insistence on a child-artist who is developed through the short poem from a mere observer who ‘only gazed’ and ‘only listened’ to the suggestive final image of the speaker ‘listening for the silence’, a Wordsworthian self-portrait which anticipates the poet’s discovery of his voice in nature. As most of Heaney’s pastoral to this stage has been (and how most of his political poetry in North will be), ‘Nesting-Ground’ is ultimately a drama of the self. In the introduction to Stations, Heaney admits the ‘delay’ in publication was partly due to the arrival of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971), a work of ‘complete authority’ in the form ‘new’75 to him. A general insecurity with the material in Stations is evidenced by Heaney’s choice to publish in the chapbook form and to collect only seven of the twenty-one poems in New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990). In his Stepping Stones  Bly, Silence in the Snowy Fields (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), p.15.  Heaney, Stations (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975), p.7. 75  Ibid., p.3. 73 74

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interviews, he acknowledges that there is ‘something in’76 Edna Longley’s criticism that the prose poem obliges ‘practitioners to load every rift unnaturally with ore in order to justify its existence’ (though he partly rebuffs her).77 His early self-commentary on Stations, however, was noticeably less confident. In his essay ‘Englands of the Mind’, first delivered as a lecture in Berkeley in May 1976, Heaney reflects on Hill’s Mercian Hymns in a manner highly revealing of his own insecurities with Stations. The Irish poet’s commentary on Hill is marked by the contradictory desire to both identify with and differentiate himself from his English contemporary. Though he does not mention his own prose collection published one year prior to this lecture, Heaney praises Mercian Hymns for the ‘double-­ focus’ of ‘a child’s-eye view’ and ‘the historian’s and scholar’s eye’ that it shares with Stations. Heaney is also at pains, however, to stress Hill’s ‘territory’ as his ‘own West Midlands’, a ‘medieval England’78 facing ‘the Celtic mysteries of Wales’ and brought to life in an ‘English Romanesque’ style of ‘verbal architecture’.79 There is a sense throughout ‘Englands of the Mind’ of Heaney dealing with a dangerous and proximate Other in Hill, one who is an uncomfortable mixture of sameness and difference: different because of his pedigree and Englishness and similar in his deployment of a Joycean ‘hyperconsciousness of words as physical sensations’.80 The shared debt to what Heaney calls ‘the Joycean precedent set in Ulysses of confounding modern autobiographical material with literary and historic matter’ may be his most regretted vulnerability to Hill, since Stations relies so heavily on ‘the Joycean epiphany’ he admires in Hill’s work. In an obvious allusion to Joyce, Stations maps the poet’s growing consciousness of language alongside the growth of an Irish national consciousness, exemplified by ‘Cloistered’ where the ‘duty priest’ is testing ‘his diction against pillar and plaster’ while the student mortifies his ‘elbows on the hard bevel’,81 and ‘The Stations of the West’, where a forlorn Heaney sits ‘on a twilit bedside listening through the wall to fluent  SS, p.181.  In response to Edna Longley’s admission to a ‘longstanding prejudice against the prose poem’, Heaney says ‘at least that time she admitted her prejudice’, SS, p.181; Longley’s comments appeared in ‘Books of the Day: Poetry from the North’, Irish Times, April 21, 1976, p.8. 78  ‘Englands of the Mind’, P, p.159–60. 79  Ibid., p.160. 80  Ibid. 81  Stations, p.20. 76 77

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Irish, homesick for a speech I was to extirpate.’82 However successful Heaney felt these verses to be when he was exploring them in California, upon discovery of Mercian Hymns he claims to have felt dominated by Hill’s ‘authority’,83 ‘weighty elegance’,84 and ‘command’,85 terms that recall Stephen Dedalus’s objection to his own English Other: ‘[t]he language in which we are speaking is his before mine’.86 Indeed, throughout the discussion of Hill Heaney betrays his wish to sidestep a powerful adversary and this could be, ultimately, why he invokes Bly in later conversations about Stations. In emphasising the American poet he had heard read in California, Heaney could perhaps limit comparison with the English one and survive by hiding, in Hart’s memorable description of the prose form itself, in ‘the border’ area, ‘disguising’ himself through ‘blending’87 origins.

ii Aside from his innovations in the prose poem form, Bly notably contributed to the increased political consciousness in the poetry of this era by founding the ‘American writers Against the Vietnam War’. In his much-­ cited interview with Randall, Heaney acknowledges that he was affected by how ‘the poets were part’ of the political atmosphere, and particularly how poets such as Bly were ‘part of the protest against the Vietnam war’. Heaney adds ‘that was probably the most important influence I came under in Berkeley, that awareness that poetry was a force, almost a mode of power, certainly a mode of resistance.’88 Given Heaney’s comments here, one might reasonably assume a link exists between the brewing political consciousness of Wintering Out and Stations and the contemporary American poetic scene he confronted at Berkeley. However, when Heaney’s political treatments from this era are compared directly with those widely available American examples, differences are far more

 Ibid., p.22.  Ibid., p.3. 84  ‘England’s of the Mind’, P, p.160. 85  Ibid., p.163. 86  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited by Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), p.205. 87  Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions, p.100. 88  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.20. 82 83

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obvious than areas of reciprocity, indicating an engagement with US poetry that is far more critically aware in this phase than is usually supposed. While it is true that the poetry of Wintering Out and Stations is marked by an increased engagement with the political violence in Northern Ireland, there are surprisingly no references to Heaney’s politically charged campus setting. Comments of Heaney’s made in a much later interview with Henri Cole offer some explanation for why the Berkeley context that critics have long emphasised as significant to these volumes is so absent from them. In a discussion of the ‘Squarings’ sequence of Seeing Things (1991), Heaney argues that the ‘arbitrariness of the twelve-line form’ gave him the freedom necessary to explore new subject matter. He explains: [i]t used to be that when I was coming over from the San Francisco Airport—I was teaching at Berkeley then, during 1970, 1971—there would be one or two young soldiers in the back of the bus, traveling across to Treasure Island Military Base, headed for Vietnam. I remember feeling at that time that it was like being in a death carriage. But somehow I did not feel that it was a part of my subject, it was too implicated in the American crisis. And yet it stayed in my mind, and I just took this flash photograph of it when I was doing the twelve-liners […] I gave myself permission, as they say, to go with it.89

Heaney’s reflection that he gave himself ‘permission’ in ‘Squarings’ to explore these images implies that he did not permit himself to ‘go with it’ in 1970–71, though such incidents clearly permeated his consciousness. This instinct Heaney describes to censor the American political scenes around him may have contributed to the noticeably tentative or ‘transitional’90 quality that was identified in early reviews of the volume. Despite this hesitation, however, there are several poems in Wintering Out that prefigure the public-spirited stance that would be fully realised in North, suggesting that the American setting of 1970–71 functioned to incubate, if not to liberate, Heaney’s political consciousness. ‘A Northern Hoard’ is one example of this censoring effect. The five-­ part poem repurposes ‘a dream’ Heaney had ‘in California’ in which he ‘glimpsed in the mirror a wounded man falling towards me with his bloodied hands lifted to tear at me or to implore.’91 Though the dream was  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, web.  ‘Semaphores of Hurt’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 December, 1972, p.1524. 91  ‘Belfast’, P, p.33. 89 90

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related to the home crisis, the Berkeley setting that gave rise to the vision is excised from the poem. The sequence, which has never been reproduced in full in any of Heaney’s collected poems editions, germinates the guilty introspection and gloomier tone that characterises North, making its omission from later selected volumes particularly noteworthy. ‘A Northern Hoard’ is marked by self-examination throughout, with Heaney anticipating his decision to ‘uproot’ from the site of ‘gunshot, siren and clucking gas’92 to Wicklow in 1972 and his painful ‘crawl’ from America to Belfast to ‘confront’ the ‘lumpy dead’ he has ‘deserted’.93 Though ‘abroad’ he is ‘a black stump of home.’94 Keeping with his Irish theme, the first section, ‘Roots’, establishes an apocalyptic tone through a conspicuous invocation of ‘The Second Coming’, where Heaney is ‘turning’ from the ‘din’ of violence where ‘the fault is opening’95 and envisions, much like Yeats, a part-human monster against whom we are ‘helpless in our old Gomorrah.’ The word ‘dream’96 appears twice in the five quatrains of ‘Roots’, foreshadowing the second section, ‘No Man’s Land’, where Heaney excoriates himself for how he has ‘shut out’ the ‘wounds’ of those he has dreamt about, asking ‘why do I unceasingly arrive / late to condone / infected sutures / and ill-knit bone?’.97 In the final section, ‘Tinder’, Heaney laments an earlier stage of his development where ‘flints’ were ‘picked’ while ‘Huddled at dusk in a ring’, an image that appears to be a reference to Heaney’s fellow Group member Michael Longley.98 Reflecting on his earlier poetry, Heaney references the Frostian ‘cave-mouth’ from where he ‘sparked a weak-flame-pollen’; often the effort ‘failed, our knuckle joints / Striking as often as the flints’–99 an image in which the lower stakes of the past imply the higher ones of the present. In a ploy that would have met Philip Hobsbaum’s New Critical standards, Heaney approximates the margin between success and failure to the difference of ‘tinder’ and ‘cinder’, flame and ash divided by a single letter. In a real  WO, p.29.  WO, p.30. 94  WO, p.30. 95  WO, p.29. 96  WO, p.29. 97  WO, p.33. 98  The phrase ‘igneous days’ may refer to Michael Longley’s metaphor in relation to the poetry of Northern Ireland being either ‘igneous’ or ‘sedimentary’. Heaney quotes Longley in ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.129. 99  WO, p.31. 92 93

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sense, then, ‘A Northern Hoard’ is not so much a poem about political violence as it is a poem about the difficulty of ever writing such a poem. Heaney’s choice to not collect ‘A Northern Hoard’ and many of the poems from Stations from his selected editions indicates that, at this time, he was struggling to settle on a preferred political form. As O’Shea observes, Heaney’s California notebook shows that he worked on numerous ‘overtly political’100 and ‘partisan’101 poems that were either uncollected, modified, or scrapped altogether. One of these poems, ‘Intimidation’, was written in Heaney’s apartment and was published in Malahat Review, a Canadian publication, in January 1971. An abandoned poem, ‘The Banner Painter’, describes an encounter with a semi-literate ‘maker of banners and regalia for Orange parades’102 and rehearses the sectarian stereotypes of the Northern Irish communities. These erased poems are very unlike most of the political material in Wintering Out, where tension is submerged or even poignantly suspended. Heaney’s mixed output in California may reflect his ambivalence for the protest poetry that was ubiquitous in California. Despite telling Randall that he came to view poetry as a political ‘force’103 in Berkeley, in a lively later interview with Karl Miller he argues ‘[p]rotest per se isn’t a contribution […] So-called political poetry, protest poetry, gets on my nerves. Political poetry in Northern Ireland shouldn’t be a spectator sport.’104 It is difficult not to read the complaints about ‘protest poetry’ here as a reference to the anti-Vietnam War poetry that surrounded him at Berkeley. Indeed, after making these comments, Heaney invokes his own poem ‘The Other Side’, which he composed in California, as a contrasting example, claiming it is ‘not a protest poem’ but ‘simply a poem which tells another bit of truth.’105 Here, Heaney’s later self-commentary corroborates the impression given by the Bancroft notebook and collected poems from the California era: far from modelling a new public-spirited verse on the available examples in Berkeley, Heaney evolved a political manner out of his ambivalent response to the protest poetry that surrounded him in California.

 O’Shea, ‘Seamus Heaney at Berkeley’, p.171.  Ibid., p.179. 102  Ibid. 103  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.20. 104  Karl Miller, Seamus Heaney: In Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p.23. 105  Ibid., p.24. 100 101

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The Berkeley campus area was itself the site of much political activity around the time of Heaney’s visit. W.  J. Rorabaugh notes that English lecturer Tom Parkinson (who arranged Heaney’s visiting lectureship) participated in a FSM (‘Free Speech Movement’) rally on July 29, 1965, against the sentencing of activist Mario Savio, and recalls that the ‘rally concluded with Allen Ginsberg chanting a mantra while beating small silver cymbals.’106 Ginsberg, Rorabaugh argues, ‘grew in importance while confronting the ever-stronger gales of war’107 during these years. In January 1967, Snyder joined Ginsberg alongside rock musicians at a ‘Human Be-In’108 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, an event which typified poetry’s active role in the political spirit of the times. The same year, Walter Lowenfels’s influential anthology Where is Vietnam? American poets respond; an anthology of contemporary poets (1967) brought antiwar poets to greater prominence. In September 1972, Poetry magazine published ‘Against the War’, a special edition which brought together numerous poetic voices under the one theme. Michael Bibby argues that ‘[s]o much antiwar poetry had been produced during this period’ that a reviewer of one anthology even remarked, ‘“[n]ot since the Civil War has any American war inspired so much impassioned poetry as the struggle in Vietnam”’.109 Bibby suggests that much of this antiwar poetry has been erased from the canon by the anthologists and university professors of the following decades for dubious ideological reasons. Later positioned at Harvard and firmly within the Anglo-American canon of modern poetry, Heaney has in fact been much better served by American criticism than the antiwar poetry he read as a young poet in Berkeley. Bibby argues that the ‘exclusion’ of Vietnam protest poetry ‘has to some extent been historically inscribed in the critical practices of American literary studies’, namely New Criticism, which ‘often served as the dominant theoretical and methodologic practice’110 for those working in the American academy the second half of the twentieth century. Bibby continues:

 W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.43.  Ibid., p.44. 108  Ibid., p.141. 109  Michael Bibby, ‘“Where Is Vietnam?” Antiwar Poetry and the Canon’, College English, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Feb., 1993), pp.159–60. 110  Ibid., p.165. 106 107

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New Criticism’s reification of the text as a self-sufficient object of analysis allowed liberal humanist intellectuals of the Cold War period an escape from the entanglements of history and politics […]; the outbreak of politically engaged poetry during Vietnam posed a direct challenge to these privileges. The New Critics’ rejection of politically oppositional poetry stems, furthermore, from the American intelligentsia’s sense of betrayal in the wake of revelations about Stalinist atrocities of the late 1930s.111

Due to its own complex historical entanglements and unique ethno-­ political conflict, American New Criticism’s greater investment ‘in the idea of the well-wrought poem outside of history, culture and politics’112 gives it, as Gail McConnell notes, a transferability to the Northern Ireland context. Quoting Derek Mahon’s argument that ‘the essential purpose of the New Critics […] was to make literature seem to be about itself and not about things the well-fed American prefers not to notice, like social evils’,113 McConnell posits: if, in the American South, New Critical reading practices function as an escape from the structural violence of slavery […] in a Northern Ireland context they constitute an escape from the structural violence of sectarianism’.114 While New Criticism, of course, represented a way of reading, and not a mode of writing, the tension between New Criticism and the various ‘social evils’ that challenge it does give some context to Heaney’s stylistic dilemmas in 1970–71 and his ambivalence for the ‘protest poetry’115 that surrounded him in California, where he had arrived in Berkeley as a university lecturer from Northern Ireland. Ironically, then, in California the New Critical schooling that was in one sense Heaney’s bridge to America led him to elide much of the poetry on the ground. It would be an error to ascribe a shared aesthetic to the wide group of poets who wrote under the antiwar banner, but it is fair to say that there are major stylistic and ideological differences between Heaney’s burgeoning political verse and that of contemporary American poets from this era. For instance, James Schuyler’s ‘May, 1972’ concludes with the emotive

 Ibid.  Gail McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp.50–1. 113  Quoted in Ibid., pp.231–32. 114  Ibid., p.232. 115  Miller, Seamus Heaney: In Conversation with Karl Miller, p.23. 111 112

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statement ‘The war / must end. It goes on.’116 Other poems in the selection address specific events even more directly, such as A. J. M. Smith’s ‘Lines Written on the Occasion of President Nixon’s Address to the Nation, May 8, 1972’, where he writes of ‘The irresponsible bombs / Dropped by anonymous hands’.117 Generally, contemporary antiwar poetry was characterised by formal breakdown and direct condemnation of the war. In the article ‘Belfast’, published in 1972, Heaney expresses strong scepticism for poetry that takes this kind of direct approach to contemporary events. Quoting Yeats, he argues that poetry ‘is out of the quarrel with ourselves and the quarrel with others is rhetoric’; ‘[i]t would wrench the rhythms of my writing procedures to start squaring up to contemporary events with more will than ways to deal with them.’118 The slightly defensive quality to this statement, made just one year after his California residency, also permeates his later commentary about Berkeley. Asked by O’Driscoll about his impression of the anti-Vietnam War movement, Heaney answers that ‘the culture of the place added up to one long steady protest.’119 For Heaney, ‘to be American’120 meant to believe ‘in the reversibility of the situation’, and he ‘couldn’t imagine a poetry reading in Belfast directed simply and solely against the Troubles’ because the ‘poets and the audience were too clued-in to the complexity’.121 However sure Heaney felt about his choices as he looked back on them, the excised material in the Bancroft notebook suggests a process of trial and error from which he may have concluded, with some degree of frustration, contemporary American poets were free to make bold statements of political protest in a way that he, constrained as he was by the greater ‘complexity’ of the Troubles, could not. When considered in view of Heaney’s later comments, there is a strong element of self-portraiture to ‘The Last Mummer’, a poem in which the central figure comes ‘trammelled / in the taboos of the country’.122 Heaney admits there is a degree of autobiography to ‘Servant Boy’, a 116   James Schuyler, ‘May, 1972’, Poetry, ‘Against the War’, September 1972, pp.237–38, web. 117  A J.  M. Smith, ‘Lines Written on the Occasion of President Nixon’s Address to the Nation, May 8, 1972’, Poetry, ‘Against the War’, September 1972, p.335. 118  ‘Belfast’, P, p.34. 119  SS, p.140. 120  SS, p.140. 121  SS, p.141. 122  WO, p.8.

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poem he intended to be ‘a portrait of a minority consciousness, a minority artist’s consciousness even’.123 The ‘jobber among shadows’124 is depicted ‘resentful / and impenitent’ and, in the poem’s (and the volume’s) key line, is described as ‘wintering out / the back-end of a bad year’ while he carries the ‘warm eggs’ that signify his hope for the future. Corcoran posits the boy in the poem is servant presumably ‘to one of the Big Houses of the Protestant Ascendancy’;125 Richard Rankin Russell has argued more recently that in ‘Servant Boy’ Heaney is also ‘brooding upon the consciousness of the outcast others such as black Americans’.126 Given that he began writing the poem in California during an extremely turbulent period in American racial politics, Russell suggests Heaney’s title is probably drawing upon the manner in which ‘white men in the American south’ used the word ‘boy’ to ‘keep them [black men] subjugated’.127 The Bancroft notebook reveals that Heaney had originally titled the poem ‘Slave Boy’, lending considerable weight to Russell’s argument.128 Heaney has commented that, as one coming to America as a member of the minority in Northern Ireland, he ‘couldn’t not be in sympathy with the Civil Rights movement’;129 yet the fact that he changed the boy’s identifier to the more general ‘servant’ suggests he again may have considered this to be another subject that was, in his own phrase, ‘too implicated in the American crisis’130 to write about directly. Whatever Heaney’s reason, the resulting decontextualized political treatment of ‘Servant Boy’ feels parabolic rather than outspoken, and therefore very unlike the protest poetry of the United States at that time. ‘Servant Boy’ develops the ‘minority consciousness’131 that would be fully realised in North, but it is also notable for its continuity with Heaney’s earlier work; like many poems in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, ‘Servant Boy’ bears strong traces of Frost’s influence. As Corcoran  SS, p.130.  WO, p.7. 125  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study, p.38. 126  Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), p.167. 127  Ibid., p.168. 128  O’Shea, ‘Seamus Heaney at Berkeley’, p.185. It is unclear if Russell was aware of this original title when his research was published. 129  SS, p.145. 130  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, web. 131  SS, p.130. 123 124

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argues, the shorter quatrains Heaney begins using in Wintering Out exemplify Frost’s explanation, often quoted by Heaney, that the poem ought to ‘ride on its melting’ like ‘a piece of ice on a hot stove’.132 More to the point, ‘Servant Boy’ has significant thematic overlap with Frost’s poems, particularly ‘Death of a Hired Man’ where the ‘worn-out’133 labourer Silas returns to Mary and Warren’s farm seeking work to ‘save his self-respect’.134 As an expert reader of Frost, Heaney would have recognised the poem as a Virgilian pastoral and a political treatment about the nature of power.135 Unlike Heaney’s earlier Frostian poems (such as ‘The Wife’s Tale’), ‘Servant Boy’ does not ventriloquise for the elder poet; rather, Heaney’s structure is the reverse of Frost’s, placing the subjugated figure at the centre of the poem. Indeed, Frost’s poem ends with Warren’s flat report that Silas is ‘Dead’136 while Heaney’s servant is left grasping the ‘warm eggs’137 that incubate the possibility of a future where he, unlike Silas, can step into some form of ‘self-respect’.138 Despite the intriguing origins of its title, then, ‘Servant Boy’ certainly does not resemble the confrontational style of protest poetry that surrounded Heaney in California. Instead, the poem is notable for Heaney’s development of a response to the Northern Irish conflict from within the safety of a familiar tableau. ‘The Other Side’ contains a similar mixture of continuity and innovation. Both Andrew Murphy and Dillon Johnston note the poem’s clear line back to the work of John Hewitt: Murphy describes ‘The Other Side’ as a ‘companion poem’139 to Hewitt’s ‘The Glens’ for its similar portrait of Catholic and Protestant neighbours while Johnson argues that Hewitt’s ‘The Hill Farm’ is also a likely source for ‘The Other Side’. ‘The Hill Farm’ concludes with a similar final image of a Protestant neighbour ‘[a]lone in the dark’, a positioning that Johnson finds suggestive of ‘the Protestants’ representation of themselves as occupiers of a garrison  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Guide, p.33.  RFCP, p.35. 134  RFCP, p.36. 135  In his letters, Frost suggests that Mary represents the Democratic and Warren the Republican in ‘Death of a Hired Man.’ See Tyler Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), p.104. 136  RFCP, p.40. 137  WO, p.7. 138  RFCP, p.36. 139  Andrew Murphy, ‘Heaney and the Irish Poetic Tradition’, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.144. 132 133

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state’.140 As Johnson argues, Heaney’s final image notably ‘redresses’141 Hewitt’s, since he places himself alongside the Protestant neighbour who waits alone on the porch, ending the poem on an image of connection rather than division. In its desire to cross the neighbourly boundaries it sets up, ‘The Other Side’ has another notable precursor in Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’.142 Indeed, the qualities of Frost’s poetry that Hewitt highlights in his influential essay ‘The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer’, such as his ‘avoidance of ornament and rhetoric’ and his ‘sinewy wisdom’,143 are precisely the attributes that would have appealed to Heaney at this juncture in his career, as he assessed his options for a political verse against the backdrop of the highly politicised poetry he was reading ambivalently in California. In Frost’s poem, the two neighbours ‘meet to walk the line’144 and repair the manmade boundary between their properties. The speaker puzzles over the neighbour’s dictum ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, asking ‘Why’145 and countering ‘we do not need the wall’ since the ‘apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines’.146 Hoffman notes that Frost’s use of ‘grammatical parallelism’ and ‘syntactic balance’147 in phrases such as ‘To each the boulders that have fallen to each’148 and ‘walling in or walling out’149 gives the impression of two-sidedness, implying that the tension between neighbours is the heat on which the poem will ride. But Frost in ‘Mending Wall’ also exploits the ironising effect of quoted speech and the subtle variances of meaning afforded by metrical stress. Indeed, as Hoffman points out, on one occasion Frost even told an audience that there was a ‘special way to say’ the poem’s major line— ‘Good fences make good neighbours’—that he knew at the time of ­writing 140  Dillon Johnston, ‘Irish Influence and Confluence in Heaney’s Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, p.152. 141  Ibid. 142  Rachel Buxton argues Heaney’s poem ‘may be viewed as a descendent of “Mending Wall”’, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.70. 143  John Hewitt, ‘The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer’, Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, edited by Tom Clyde (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1987), p.120. 144  RFCP, p.33. 145  RFCP, p.34. 146  RFCP, p.33. 147  Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, p.76. 148  RFCP, p.33. 149  RFCP, 34.

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the poem but has since forgotten.150 Though it is possible to read the phrase in a number of ways, and how we hear it is affected by who is saying it (the narrator or the neighbour), the word ‘make’ is the key to understanding the line’s double meaning: the two neighbours are paradoxically brought together in the act of making, or, indeed, habitually re-making the very wall that exists to keep them separate. Like all borders, the property line in ‘Mending Wall’ is a point of convergence as well as disjunction, much as Frost appears to be for Hewitt and Heaney, who each value his achievement but from the differing perspectives of Catholic and Protestant. ‘The Other Side’ contains several corresponding features and exploits ambiguity to achieve a similarly poignant image of connection. The poem’s structure makes use of threes, progressing as a series of tercets written in a triptych form, presumably to reflect the overtly religious theme and the resolution of two halves. Like Frost’s poem, the farmer-neighbour is quoted directly in the poem, most notably when he dismisses the Heaney’s farm as being as ‘poor as Lazarus’—a ‘biblical dismissal’151 that epitomises his Protestant otherness. Similar to ‘Mending Wall’, the neighbour’s speech is related sardonically (‘For days we would rehearse / each patriarchal dictum’)152 and rendered in authentic vernacular (‘“A right-looking night,” / he might say’).153 Heaney then offers this moving final image: Should I slip away, I wonder, or go up and touch his shoulder and talk about the weather or the price of grass-seed?154

There is an effective open-endedness in this last rhetorical device, whose meaning varies depending on how it is read. Helen Vendler argues that ‘the poet’s final question’ in ‘The Other Side’ asks if ‘even superficial and conventional interactions’ are ‘preferable to a frozen and excluding cultural silence’.155 In Johnson’s view, such ‘apparently clichéd and trivial topics—weather and market prices—actually concern survival and real values, and therefore bind neighbours together,  See Hoffman, Robert Frost the Politics of Poetry, p.108.  WO, p.24. 152  WO, p.25. 153  WO, p.25. 154  WO, p.26. 155  Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.83. 150 151

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as in that original sense of religion that Heaney often cites.’156 Taking ‘Mending Wall’ as a critical access point, it is fair to say that, just as in Frost’s poem, the thing that has divided the neighbours—in this case religious difference—ultimately unites them in this quiet display of respect, underscoring the fact that common ground can exist despite borders. Heaney tells O’Driscoll that the Protestant neighbour in ‘The Other Side’ is ‘old Johnny Junkin’,157 whose property bordered the Heaney’s farm. Asked about his relationship with Protestant neighbours generally, Heaney remarks that they ‘were both beside us and on the other side’, they ‘had enough inner freedom and confidence to retain friendships and dignity, no matter what kind of overall tension and hurt everybody had to endure.’158 The ‘trans-sectarian’ nature Heaney identifies in this neighbourliness is presumably the ‘bit of truth’159 he feels is captured in ‘The Other Side’. And there is indeed a sense of a formula being struck here in the poem’s ending, something Heaney’s later, proud acknowledgements of the poem seem to confirm. After North, Heaney would return to this mode and typically examine the subject of the Troubles through the lens of personal elegies for neighbours and relatives. It remains an overlooked fact that the optimistic political poems Heaney composed in California (‘Servant Boy’, ‘The Other Side’) are more suggestive of the direction his poetics would take in the longer term than his next, darker volume, North, which has been given considerably more attention than Wintering Out. And if there is an American element to these Wintering Out poems besides their Frostian echoes, it lies in this quiet hopefulness in progress, or, in Heaney’s phrase, the characteristically American belief in ‘the reversibility of the situation.’160 Though these poems avoid the direct moral statements that characterise the contemporary US poetry of this era, poems such as ‘The Other Side’ and ‘Servant Boy’ contain the features of much American writing concerned with the myth of the Dream—that ‘strange but compelling mixture of elegiac and optimistic feeling’ that ‘characterised early European writing about America’ and ‘coloured American writing ever since’,161 in Gray’s analysis. A similar blend of feelings drives much of Heaney’s later rhetoric about  Johnson, ‘Irish Influence and Confluence in Heaney’s Poetry’, p.152.  SS, p.24. 158  SS, p.132. 159  Miller, Seamus Heaney: In Conversation with Karl Miller, p.92. 160  SS, p.141. 161  Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, pp.6–7. 156 157

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poetry and politics, particularly in ‘Frontiers of Writing’ where, the American bent implied by the title, he describes Ulster as a ‘place that does not exist, a place that is but a dream’;162 or his Nobel speech, where he credits poetry for its ‘power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values’.163 There is certainly some of the uniquely American combination of ‘[l]onging for an idealised yesterday and hope for an imagined tomorrow’164 about these kinds of claims for poetry’s rightness. Intriguing and substantial as some of these shared ideals are, it is undeniable that Heaney’s on-the-ground engagement with American poetry during his California sojourn was, at best, mixed. Heaney’s discarded poems from the Bancroft notebook and his ambivalent statements about much of what he read in 1970–71 support Kennedy-Andrews’s wider argument that, throughout his career, Heaney often finds it more productive to ‘[define] himself against the Americans’; he views them ‘warily and selectively’ in order to ‘confirm his own artistic decisions’.165 ‘The Tollund Man’ feels as though it may be the outcome of the process Kennedy-­ Andrews describes, for, despite being written in California, the poem represents a fortification of the statement made in the earlier ‘Bogland’, where Heaney works against American standards to remarkable effect. Due to his many comments about the personal significance of ‘The Tollund Man’, Heaney has been a corroborating presence in much critical writing about the poem. His remarks in interview with Randall, where he explains his epiphany after reading P.  V. Glob’s The Bog People and his sense that the photographs of preserved bodies connected him to a distant Irish ancestry, are frequently quoted in Heaney criticism.166 In most major studies, ‘The Tollund Man’ is viewed as a powerful transitional poem linking ‘Bogland’ and the bog body sequence of North, and is situated within the wider context of modern Irish writing about political violence. Again,  ‘Frontiers of Writing’, R, p.190.  CP, p.467. 164  Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, p.6. 165  Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), p.97. NB Kennedy-Andrews also argues that ‘Heaney’s creative impulse’ is shaped in part by American influences ‘in the direction of the transcendental. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman—their DNA signatures are inscribed on the genome of the culture in which Heaney was installed’, p.63. 166  Heaney tells Randall the figures in the photographs ‘seemed like an ancestor almost, one of my old uncles, one of those moustached archaic faces you used to meet all over the Irish countryside.’ ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.18. 162 163

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Heaney supplies helpful commentary. In ‘The Sense of Place’, he argues that it is the ‘feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind […] that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation.’167 ‘The Tollund Man’ consciously pushes towards this marriage of ‘geography’ and ‘mind’, with the bog providing a metaphor for the country’s past and national psyche, much as it did in ‘Bogland’. But it is worth examining the poem in a different context from the one Heaney directs us towards, and that is the rather unlikely American setting in which it was originally written. O’Shea notes that Heaney began composing the poem during his first semester of teaching in Berkeley, and that ‘Bob Tracy vividly remembers Heaney first reciting “The Tollund Man” at an English Department reading.’168 Far from showing traces of a Californian influence, however, ‘The Tollund Man’ is a synthesis of the poetic strands that make Heaney’s achievement distinctly unlike that of his American contemporaries. Like ‘The Other Side’, ‘The Tollund Man’ utilises a three-part structure and deploys the same narrow quatrains that serve very effectively elsewhere in Wintering Out. From the first line of the poem (‘Some day I will go to Aarhus’),169 it is clear that Heaney intends to valorise the poetic act and construct a new and more serious identity for himself as poet. This poetic identity in ‘The Tollund Man’ involves an interplay of history, recovery, and Christianity. It is difficult to overstate how much this differs from the ambitions of poets such as Snyder and Bly. In particular, it is worth comparing the role of nature in Heaney’s formulations of identity in ‘The Tollund Man’ to that of his American contemporaries. While it is Bly’s wish to let nature ‘live for itself’ and exist ‘complete without us’,170 in ‘The Tollund Man’ Heaney depicts the bog victim as ‘Bridegroom to the goddess’, submerged in the bog’s ‘dark juices’ and with ‘winter seeds’ still ‘Caked in his stomach’.171 In this image, nature and the human past are indivisibly as one. Moreover, Heaney’s imagined pilgrimage to ‘the flat country nearby / Where they dug him out’, through an entranced focus on the submerged body’s details (‘Naked except for / The cap’),172 is in fact made in the mind of the poet. By line fifteen, Heaney is so immersed  P, p.132.  O’Shea, ‘Seamus Heaney at Berkeley’, p.178. 169  WO, p.36. 170  Bly, The Morning Glory, preface. 171  WO, p.36. 172  WO, p.36. 167 168

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in his hallucination that he renders it in the present tense; as the land is ‘working’ the body to sainthood beneath him, it also appears to be ‘working’ on him. It is clear from these moments that the imagined past activates the poet’s consciousness and desire to mythologise, daring him to go further than before in the development of his poet-as-archaeologist trope. Stylistically, the second section is both uneasy and confident in its connection-­ making, with Heaney beginning ‘I could risk blasphemy’ before going on to do the very thing that entails risk, asking the ‘holy’ bog to ‘make germinate’ the Irish victims who were ‘trailed / For miles along the lines’.173 Heaney, it seems, knows that the real ‘risk’ here is not of ‘blasphemy’ but of attenuating the complexities of the two histories being fused, a poetic manoeuvre that became the controversial signature of North. As in ‘Bogland’, the bog in ‘The Tollund Man’ functions very differently to the role of the landscape in much American thinking about national identity. While early influential American writers took encouragement from their uniquely vast landscapes and used nature to shape their representations of themselves as a new people, nature in Heaney’s formulation is subordinated to exemplifying pre-programmed responses to Irish history, writing back to myths such as Cathleen Ní Houlihán. This is not a subtle distinction, and the function of nature in ‘The Tollund Man’, like ‘Bogland’, points to a significant chasm between Heaney’s thinking and much American poetry. In California, Heaney struggles to reconcile the fact that American writing is largely a tradition of experiment and innovation, one that still possesses the characteristics envisaged by Tocqueville (‘incorrect, overburdened, and loose’)174 and perceives itself in Whitman’s terms (‘transcendent and new’).175 It is perhaps with some measure of defiance, then, that Heaney dedicates himself, with religious fervency, to the ideal of the poet as one who takes possession of a shared human past in ‘The Tollund Man’. However one values the handling of politics in ‘The Tollund Man’, its focus on the issues of ‘home’176 underscores the fact that Heaney leaves California in 1971 without new exemplars or models, despite dedicating  WO, p.37.  Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, translated by Henry Reeve (London: Longman, 1862), Chapter 13, p.70. 175  Quoted in Leo Marx, The Americanness of Walt Whitman, edited with an introduction by Leo Marx (Boston: D.D. Heath and Company, 1960), p.51. 176  WO, p.37. 173 174

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himself to Olson and attending the readings of Snyder and Bly.177 None of these poets are collected in The Rattle Bag (1982), the anthology Heaney co-edited with Ted Hughes.178 It appears, then, that Heaney’s critics (and Heaney himself) may have succumbed to the temptation to view the 1970–71  year in California as a foreshadowing of his later transatlantic reputation. Indeed, when considering Heaney’s mixed commentary about his California residency and the poetry he read there, one is reminded of remarks made by Allen in his 1967 review of Denis Donoghue’s Connoisseurs of Chaos (1966): When a good critic schooled in English literature writes [a book about American poetry], he accepts that the works in which he will fully and creatively find himself are comparatively thin on the ground. He needs to deflate over-expanded reputations (as Donoghue does, tenderly but firmly, in the case of William Carlos Williams). He may then need to make up the decimated ranks by stressing the ‘major’ qualities in fairly ‘minor’ writers […] Donoghue sometimes seems to be marshalling eloquence, sensitivity, courtesy and intelligence to make a case for poetry to which, at the deepest level, he is not committed.179

There is in some of Heaney’s earlier, more favourable commentary about the poetry he read in California a sense of him ‘marshalling eloquence’ in the manner Allen describes, such as when he praises Snyder for ‘rejecting the intellectual, ironical, sociological idiom’,180 while, in his later, less frequently cited statements—particularly those about Carlos Williams—there is indeed an element of deflation, ‘tenderly but firmly’, such as when he admits: ‘I kept looking and saying, is this all? And I came to realize that the answer was, yes, this is all.’181 To return to Corcoran’s recent Mahon-inspired analysis of Heaney’s continuity across his volumes—‘you cannot step into the same river twice […] but you can step into it once for ever—182 one senses Heaney’s frustration in California of trying, without much success, to step into the same 177  Heaney tells O’Driscoll that these images in the poem came from photographs he saw in The Wolfe Tone Annual, a ‘compendium of historical and Republican lore’. SS, p.135. 178  Olson’s ‘At Yorktown’ is collected in The School Bag (1997), however. 179  Quoted by Longley, ‘Afterword’, Michael Allen Close Readings: Essays on Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2015), p.305. 180  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, pp.19–10. 181  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney the Art of Poetry No. 75’, web. 182  Ibid., p.120.

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river twice. The America Heaney steps into, once and forever, remains the one he discovered in Belfast in the 1960s and, in the aftermath of the Berkeley residency, he returns to some of the American writers he read earlier with renewed fascination, particularly Lowell, who would become the chief influence on the political form that brought him to international prominence in the 1970s. Notably, much of what Heaney values in Lowell corresponds to what he dislikes in the protest poetry of Berkeley. Heaney admires Lowell for his command of metre and his canonical eloquence, ‘those New Critical qualities which had originally made him pre-­ eminent’.183 Some of the poems featured in his next volumes North and Field Work (1979) even drew comparisons to Lowell in contemporary reviews, bringing his relationship with American poetry dramatically to the fore. In the 1970s, then, Heaney’s navigation of US poetry is characterised by both influence and elision, underlining the sense in which it remained for him, despite the much-discussed California residency, part-­ origin and part-other.

183  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell,’ The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.315.

CHAPTER 4

Together and Apart: Heaney and Lowell

In the 1970s, Robert Lowell became a driving force behind Heaney’s political form and poetic persona. Due to their public friendship and Heaney’s dedicated poem, ‘Elegy’, Lowell’s influence has received more critical attention than most of Heaney’s other American exemplars. Today, the generally accepted argument is that Heaney originally admired Lowell out of a tendency to revere ‘people who took risks’, in Seamus Deane’s terms, ‘because [Heaney] disliked in himself a characteristic that he felt was a failure.’1 However, Lowell provided Heaney both an example and a warning, illustrating the high cost of the poetic daring that brought him to international prominence. This dynamic vaguely recalls the relationship between W. B. Yeats and Walt Whitman, described by Terence Diggory as one in which the Irish poet retreats where the American poet is perceived to have gone too far and advances where the American poet stops short.2 Out of this productive tension, Lowell becomes Heaney’s model for both the bold political verse of North (1975) and the elegies of Field Work (1979). The public friendship between Heaney and Lowell, one in which each praised the other’s work in the manner of partnership,3 was another  Seamus Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus’, New Yorker (20 March, 2000), p.66.  Terence Diggory, Yeats & American poetry: The Tradition of the Self (Princeton, New Jersey: 1983), p.29. 3  In 1966 Heaney published ‘Prospero in Agony’, a review of For the Union Dead, in Outposts 68 (Spring) and later gave a review of The Dolphin, History, and For Lizzie and 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7_4

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complicating factor in the influence, especially as Lowell’s credibility fell dramatically after his death in 1977. In Heaney’s later writings, he often expresses an intriguing mixture of wariness for Lowell’s achievement and scepticism for the ‘new climate’4 which held his posthumous reputation in abeyance. Curiously, when asked about the influences present in the public poems of Field Work, Heaney tells O’Driscoll that he was consciously ‘ventriloquizing for Robert Lowell’;5 yet, as several commentators have noted, certain poems in Field Work equally write against Lowell’s example. In Field Work there is a sense in which this ‘ventriloquizing’ operates not so much as Lowell speaking through Heaney, but as Heaney speaking for Lowell, or as Lowell might have done, in Heaney’s view, if he too had shown some better judgement. In Ireland, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Lowell in recent years. In March 2017, a three-day event was held to mark Lowell’s centenary at the University of Dublin, Trinity College. Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry (2020), a critical volume edited by Eve Cobain and Philip Coleman, features essays by several prominent critics as well as contributions from Paul Muldoon and Marie Heaney. In their introduction, the editors emphasise ‘the breadth and depth of Lowell’s presence in the Irish poetic landscape’.6 As Lowell’s New York Times obituary notes, he was in fact ‘returning from Ireland where he had been visiting his wife and son’7 when he suffered a fatal heart attack on 12 September 1977. Lowell’s celebrity on the Irish literary scene during the mid-70s is epitomised by his famous appearance at the 1975 Kilkenny Arts festival—as Heaney’s guest—and the Honorary DLitt degree he was awarded by Trinity College in 1976. In his oration at Trinity, J. V. Luce praised Lowell for ‘the richness and power of his verse’, adding that though Lowell’s writing ‘shows American forthrightness’, he ‘composes for the most part in carefully controlled rhythms’ and adheres to ‘the principles and example of poets

Harriet on the radio broadcast Imprint for which Lowell thanked him personally; SS, p.217. Later events discussed in main text. 4  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell’, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, edited by Ian Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.315. 5  SS, p.194. 6  Eve Cobain and Philip Coleman, editors, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry (Dublin: Peter Lang, 2020), pp.5–6. 7  ‘Robert Lowell, Pulitzer Prize Poet, Is Dead at 60’, The New York Times, 13 September, 1977, web.

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distinguished for their careful craftmanship.’8 There is an impression here, as there often is in Heaney’s writings, of Lowell as both totemic of American power and yet easily exportable to Europe, and especially to Ireland, where his unique combination of formal authority and political subject matter had a particular resonance. Cobain and Coleman suggest that it was because of these characteristics that Lowell ‘struck a chord’ with the Northerners ‘Heaney and Mahon, for whom the challenge of how best to engage with the unfolding catastrophe of the Troubles in Northern Ireland was such a central concern during this period.’9 The first to christen Heaney ‘the best Irish poet since W. B. Yeats’,10 the public relationship with Lowell undoubtedly boosted Heaney’s profile in America. Heaney recalls that Lowell was ‘a classic’11 when he was a Queen’s undergraduate, and that Lowell became ‘part of the air we breathed’12 during the years of the Group. Heaney even reviewed Lowell’s For the Union Dead (1964) in one of his earliest published essays and later praised Lowell’s sonnet volumes on a radio review programme, leading Lowell to thank him personally.13 The two met in 197214 and developed a brief but intense friendship over the next several years, with Heaney hosting Lowell in Ireland and sending him drafts of poems that were later collected in Field Work. After Lowell’s death, Heaney delivered a high-profile memorial address in London, published ‘Elegy’, and included critical essays about Lowell’s work in two of his major prose volumes.15 Heaney also 8  John Victor Luce, ‘Oration on the Conferral of an Honorary DLitt Degree on Robert Lowell by the University of Dublin, Trinity College, 31 May 1976’, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry, p.18. 9  Cobain and Cobain, editors, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry, p.2. 10  ‘Books of the Year’, Observer, 14 December, 1975, p.19. 11  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Art of Poetry’, No. 75., Paris Review, 1997, web. 12  SS, p.217. 13  In 1966 Heaney published ‘Prospero in Agony’, a review of For the Union Dead, in Outposts 68 (Spring) and later gave a review of The Dolphin, History, and For Lizzie and Harriet on the radio broadcast Imprint for which Lowell thanked him personally; SS, p.217. 14  Heaney recalls he first met Lowell at party given by Sonia Orwell in 1972 in SS. See SS, pp. 216–17. 15  Heaney’s essay ‘Full Face’, a review of Lowell’s Day by Day (1978),was originally published in the Irish Times, 1 April, 1978, and was later collected in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–78 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980); an extract from the memorial address, originally delivered on 5 October, 1977, was published in The New York Review of Books as ‘On Robert Lowell’, 9 February 1978, web; ‘Lowell’s Command’, originally delivered as part of the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture series given at the University of Kent 1986, was published by Salmugundi 80 (Fall 1988) pp.83–101 and collected in GT.

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wrote a critical summary of Lowell’s achievement for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English while the lesser-known tribute poem, ‘Pit Stop Near Castletown’, was published in 2003 (though it dates back to the 1970s). Due to his extensive writings about Lowell and the public nature of their friendship, Heaney was frequently asked about their relationship by interviewers, adding yet more commentary to this already sizeable pile. While some irregularity is to be expected given this long timeframe, Heaney’s comments about Lowell often appear inconsistent when presented side-by-side. This has proved challenging and yet compelling for the critics who are intrigued by the relationship for its Bloomian quality. Detailed considerations of Lowell’s influence are common in most of the major Heaney studies that appeared in the 1990s, but more recently the commentary of Stephen James, Michael Cavanagh, John Dennison, and Meg Tyler has deepened critical understanding of Lowell’s influence on Heaney.16 Though interest in the relationship will undoubtedly continue (a fact evidenced by the publication of two notable essays in 2020 alone),17 Cavanagh’s chapter-length discussion remains the most complete overview of Lowell’s influence to date and demonstrates that the connections between the two poets are vast enough for the topic to warrant a full study of its own. Like most of the relevant criticism, Cavanagh focuses mostly on Field Work, where Heaney’s engagement with Lowell is revealingly selective; yet it is worth turning first to North, where the younger Heaney is experimenting with a public form that is very much in Lowell’s cast. The influence of Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) on the autobiographical, notebook style of part II of North is clear, but the bog body sequence of 16  Stephen James, Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill, and Heaney (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); Michael Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2009); Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); John Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Meg Tyler, A Singing Contest: Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (New York: Routledge, 2005). Tyler also analyses Lowell’s influence on Heaney in ‘“The Whole of Me A-Patter”: Image, Feeling, and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’, “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), pp.129–48. 17  Stephen Grace, ‘“thudding in a big sea”: The Oceanic Ecologies of Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney’, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry; Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 109, No. 436 (Winter 2020/2021), pp. 448–57.

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part I may also have precursors in Lowell’s earlier canonical poems. Typically understood in the Irish context due to the local themes, Heaney’s bog body sequence in North could owe something to the Atlantic Ocean of Lowell’s early and middle volumes, where the sea performs a corresponding role as a natural repository of history. If Lowell’s ocean seems too far-flung a source for Heaney’s bog body sequence, it is worth remembering that ‘Bogland’ was written in response to Roethke’s ‘In Praise of Prairie’. Furthermore, Heaney repeatedly frames Lowell as a poet who is braced by literary tradition and who mythologises the past, the two features that characterise his own early approach to the Troubles. Introducing Lowell at the Kilkenny Arts festival, Heaney mobilises a vocabulary of terms that he repackages later for The Government of the Tongue to argue that Lowell is a poet who, like all great poets, ‘stands between the masterpieces of the past’ and makes ‘us see what it has always meant to be human’, transforming ‘that flux of self and reality of the times into forms that will stand beside those other lines of masterpieces.’18 The mission of the poet, in Heaney’s eyes, is fundamentally an historical and public one. Heaney’s view of Lowell as ‘a link in that great chain of […] modern poetry’19 may have been influenced by Geoffrey Moore’s commentary in The Penguin Book of American Verse (1954). In his brief biography, Moore emphasises Lowell’s literary credentials, the ‘great break’20 of his conversion to Catholicism, and the praise of T.  S. Eliot, who took a personal interest in Lowell’s early career. Writing before Lowell had even published Life Studies, for Moore ‘Lowell is probably the most important of the younger American poets; certainly he is among the first two or three.’21 Heaney recalls reading Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’ in Moore’s anthology and, in his opening remarks at Kilkenny, describes the poem as one ‘that can be mentioned in the same breath as Lycidas without embarrassment.’22 While estimations of Lowell’s genius have varied widely in the years since his death, Heaney’s special admiration for ‘Quaker’ at

18  Heaney, ‘Introduction to Robert Lowell Reading at Kilkenny Arts Week, Kytler’s Inn, Kilkenny, 28 August 1975’, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry, pp.251–2. 19  Ibid., p.252. 20  Geoffrey Moore, editor, The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (London: Penguin, 1954), p.290. 21  Ibid., p.291. 22  Heaney, ‘Introduction to Robert Lowell Reading at Kilkenny Arts Week, Kytler’s Inn, Kilkenny, 28 August 1975’, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry, p.252.

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this time suggests that the poem held personal significance for him as he began the process of refining his own approach to public themes. One of Lowell’s most lauded early poems, ‘Quaker’ features a drowning body, namely that of his cousin Warren Winslow. While Lowell primarily draws on the oceanic images of Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau’s work, Rebecca Mills notes that Lowell references several other important literary precursors to create a ‘chaotic whirlpool of influences.’23 The poem’s fourth section exemplifies the literary allusion, verbal density, and metrical fervour that characterise much of Lowell’s magisterial early verse. Packed with alliterative and assonantal echoes, Lowell works up a Cranean ‘spindrift’24 as the ‘fools’ of Melville’s Pequod ‘sail / Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale’.25 Stephen Grace points out that Lowell’s mimetic devices effectively recreate on a linguistic level the ‘chaos and confusion’26 of the ocean, a ploy that helps Lowell liken the experience of being at sea to that of being immersed in history. At the same time, however, Lowell’s robust iambic pentameter allows him to effectively assert himself among the canonical voices he invokes. Fusing all its various strands, the poem concludes on the ‘rainbow’ of the Lord’s ‘will’,27 an image that writes back to the whiteness of the whale in the poem’s fifth section. In Moby Dick, Melville takes pains to explain that white ‘is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours’; white is both a ‘symbol of spiritual things’ and the ‘all-colour of atheism’.28 The ‘rainbow’ of God’s ‘will’, then, far from providing resolution, contains the annihilating white whale of Lowell’s ocean, which, like history itself, conceals much danger and uncertainty.

23  Rebecca Mills, ‘The Elegiac Tradition and the Imagined Geography of the Sea and the Shore’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2015), p.502. 24  Hart Crane, who Lowell admired, deploys the word ‘spindrift’ in his own oceanic poem ‘Voyages’. Monroe K. Spears argues Crane’s ‘image suggests the equation of sea and death […] spindrift is windblown spray, hence sea united with air’. Spears, Hart Crane – American Writers 47: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 47 (University of Minnesota Press, 1965), p.30. Crane took his own life by jumping overboard into the Gulf of Mexico in 1932. His body was never recovered. 25  RLCP, p.16. 26  Grace, ‘“thudding in a big sea”: The Oceanic Ecologies of Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney’, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry, p.502. 27  RLCP, p.18. 28  Herman Melville, Moby Dick, introduction by David Herd (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993), pp.162–3.

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The last of the bog poems in the North sequence, Heaney’s ‘Kinship’ perhaps has more obvious divergences from ‘Quaker’ than it does shared features. For instance, Heaney’s poem notably lacks Lowell’s high eloquence and signature density, but, like Lowell, Heaney deploys a number of devices to create a formal and thematic unity. The clearest instance of this is Heaney’s choice not to capitalise each new line and to use a much narrower quatrain throughout the bog sequence than in his previous volumes. The effect of these stanzas—‘drills’29 as Heaney calls them—is felt throughout North, but it is particularly effective in the third quatrain of ‘Kinship’: the bog floor shakes, water cheeps and lists as I walk down rushes and heather.30

As Lowell’s poem in a sense becomes the chaotic whirlpool it describes, Heaney’s poem opens like the ‘bog’ which, Heaney tells us, means ‘soft’, like ‘the fall of windless rain’. This sensation is reinforced by each softened line that pulls the reader down the page, into the ‘Ruminant’ stomach of the poem where the ‘digestion of mollusc / and seed-pod’31 attest to the power of the symbolic landscape. Much as Lowell does in ‘Quaker’, Heaney indulges here in some literary allusion (‘This centre holds / and spreads’),32 even writing back to his own earlier poem ‘Bogland’ (‘Ground that will strip / its dark side’).33 ‘Kinship’, like the bog body sequence generally, works to install a geographical history, one that is both personal (‘outback of my mind’)34 and communal (‘I stand at the edge of centuries’).35 Heaney also employs a religious vocabulary and concludes the poem on an image of the pagan ‘goddess’ who ‘swallows / our love 29  Heaney explains, ‘I was burrowing inwards, and those thin small quatrain poems, they’re kind of drills or augers for turning in and they are narrow and long and deep.’ James Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, Vol. 5, No. 3. (1979), p.16. 30  N, p.33. 31  N, p.34. 32  N, p.36. 33  N, p.35. In ‘Bogland’ Heaney writes ‘Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before.’ DD, p.56. 34  N, p.35. 35  N, p.36.

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and terror’;36 in other words, the poem ends on the mixed ‘rainbow’ of her ‘will’,37 a corresponding image that tingles with cold indifference. While Heaney and Lowell choose different forms for ‘Kinship’ and ‘Quaker’, their aims within each poem are therefore broadly the same: both poems transform history into a perilous landscape and, in doing so, turn the past into a world over which the poet alone presides. Elsewhere in the bog body sequence of North, Heaney echoes Sylvia Plath. Plath has long proved a challenging poet for critics to situate within the Heaney pantheon, and it remains difficult to define what it is, exactly, that he takes from her. Neil Corcoran describes her as ‘an unexpected, but absorbed influence’38 while Kennedy-Andrews argues she is ‘an interesting test case’39 because she seems to simultaneously embody both what Heaney struggles to identify with in American poetry (its emphasis on novelty and the individual self) and what he values about it (its verbal energy and dramatic power). This ambivalence is clear in his later critical examination of her work, ‘The Indefatigable Hooftaps: Sylvia Plath’, where he is noticeably more willing than elsewhere in his prose to engage with what he sees as the limits, as well as the merits, of the achievement under discussion. Because of this essay, and because of his connection to Ted Hughes, the allusions in the North sequence to the poems of Plath’s Ariel (1965) continue to draw critical attention.40 In Heaney’s ‘Indefatigable Hoof-taps’, we see Plath through the eyes of Lowell, who memorably likened Plath’s poetic control to that ‘of a skier who avoids every death-trap until reaching the final drop’,41 and ‘her husband’42 Ted Hughes, who edited Sylvia Plath Collected Poems (1981). Charting Plath’s career, Heaney cites Hughes’s description of her as an ‘obedient neophyte’ who, when composing her early poems, worked ‘very slowly’ in a ‘laborious inching way’.43 In his own close readings of Plath’s  N, p.39.  RLCP, p.18. 38  Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p.51. 39  Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection, p.97. 40  On the 6th November, 2020, The National Library of Ireland hosted a lecture by Jennifer Duffy, ‘The feeling of irresistible given-ness’, on Heaney’s connections with Plath. 41  Ted Hughes, ‘The chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’, Tri-Quarterly, Fall 1966, Vol. 7, p.82. Quoted by Heaney, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.151. 42  ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.152. 43  Quoted by Heaney, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.152. 36 37

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poems, he traces her artistic development through a careful chronology, much like Hughes, who arranged her work chronologically in his Collected Poems edition. Heaney even quotes from Hughes’s essay ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’, where he argues that the ‘order of the poems is an important help to understanding them.’44 However one feels about Hughes’s reorganisation of Plath’s poetry, it is clear in ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps’ that Heaney intends to align himself with Hughes, who was Heaney’s anthology co-editor45 and close friend by this time. Much has been written about Hughes’s role as editor of Plath’s work, and many of his choices remain extremely controversial.46 In the introduction to his Collected Poems edition, Hughes acknowledges that years earlier he had altered the sequence of poems that appeared in the original Ariel, despite Plath having arranged these carefully in another order prior to her death by suicide in 1963. For critics such as Marjorie Perloff, this constituted an unethical manipulation of Plath’s work. Writing in 1984—four years before the publication of The Government of the Tongue—Perloff compares what would have been Plath’s version of Ariel to Hughes’s and argues that Hughes’s re-ordering and exclusion of certain poems effectively ‘presents us with a Sylvia Plath who is victimised by her time and place rather than by a specific personal betrayal’,47 namely Hughes’s affair, which Plath learned of in April 1962. For Perloff, Hughes expunges poems that deal with ‘struggle and revenge’48 and chooses to end the collection ‘with ten death poems’,49 thus making ‘the motif of inevitability larger than it really was.’50 Heaney does not mention Hughes’s controversial role in presenting Plath to the public after her death, but instead reinforces the inevitability of her ‘fate’,51 even describing some of the poems in Ariel as ‘morbid’.52 Just as Heaney’s friendship with Lowell causes him  Hughes, ‘The chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’, p.81.  Heaney and Hughes co-edited The Rattle Bag (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). 46  See Marianne Egeland, Claiming Sylvia Plath: the Poet as Exemplary Figure (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 98–101. 47  Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making Of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, The American Poetry Review, November/December, 1984, Vol. 13, No. 6, p.14. 48  Perloff, ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making Of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, p.16. 49  Ibid., p.11. 50  Ibid., p.16. 51  ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.160. 52  Ibid., p.168. 44 45

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to overlook his sometimes problematic representation of women, Heaney’s loyalty to Hughes appears to be at the root of his ambivalent reading of Plath. The result is an essay that, at times, feels strangely critical of a poetic achievement from which Heaney evidently drew some inspiration. It is easy to see the appeal of Plath’s images to Heaney as he composed the bog body sequence, particularly the ‘nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth’53 in ‘Lady Lazarus’, or the ‘dead’, smile-wearing ‘perfected’ woman of ‘Edge’.54 ‘Medusa’ is another potential source: Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs, Eyes rolled by white sticks, Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences,55

The horrifying image is mirrored in the American-inflected ‘Strange Fruit’, a sonnet from the bog body sequence which begins ‘Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd. / Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-­ stones for teeth.’56 However, whereas the ‘signature poems of the bitch goddess’, in Edward Butscher’s terms, offer a ‘symbolic marriage’ between her ‘life and art’,57 Heaney’s are part of a mythic sequence, one in which he rather notoriously describes himself as ‘the artful voyeur’.58 Thus, while Plath’s poems represent a powerful confrontation with the self as other, Heaney’s bog poems offer a more straightforward, and problematic, encounter with an objectified female corpse. How, then, does Heaney wish to position himself in relation to Plath? In his review of Lowell’s Day by Day (1978), Heaney depicts Plath as a poet (like John Berryman), who ‘swam away powerfully into the dark swirls of the unconscious and the drift towards death’, in contrast to Lowell, who ‘resisted that, held fast to 53  Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p.244. 54  Ibid., p.272. 55  Ibid., p.224. 56  N, p.32; both Richard Rankin Russell and Gail McConnell note the poem references the song, made famous by Billie Holiday, which depicts scenes of lynching in the American south. See Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), pp.169–85; Gail McConnell, ‘Heaney and the Photograph: ‘Strange Fruit’ in Manuscript and Published Form’, Irish University Review, 47 Supplement 2017. 57  Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (Tucson, Arizona: Schaffner Press, 2003), p.335. 58  ‘Punishment’, N, p.31.

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conscience and pushed deliberately toward self-mastery.’59 In this formulation, it is clear Heaney favours, and therefore wishes to identify himself with, Lowell’s example. ‘Bog Queen’ might be an instance of Heaney’s effort to bring a Lowellian ‘self-mastery’60 to a Plath model. In Heaney’s poem, the speaker lies ‘waiting / between turf-face and demesne wall’, a kind of ‘braille for the creeping influences’ that has been ‘digested’ by ‘the seeps of winter’.61 In his final lines, Heaney’s speaker tells how she ‘rose from the dark, / hacked bone, skull-ware’.62 Heaney’s image mirrors Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’: Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.63

Corcoran notes this similarity and argues that ‘Bog Queen’ ‘appears structurally indebted’64 to ‘Lady Lazarus’. Though she too recognises that ‘Bog Queen’ ‘owes something’ to Plath’s poem, Helen Vendler implies that Heaney’s speaker differs in that she has ‘the objectivity of one who can see her own disintegration.’65 Heaney would certainly have approved of Vendler’s distinction, since he criticises ‘Lady Lazarus’ in his prose for harnessing ‘the cultural resonance of the original story’ to ‘a vehemently self-justifying purpose’, thus slighting ‘the supra-personal dimensions of knowledge’ for ‘the intense personal need of the poet.’66 However, the ‘self-forgetfulness’67 Heaney finds lacking in Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ is, as Fran Brearton observes, more sensitively understood today as ‘a luxury denied the female poet struggling to express female subjectivity’.68 The word ‘braille’ in ‘Bog Queen’ may therefore be an apt one. Nevertheless, Heaney’s ability to take inspiration from poets whose work contains female  ‘Full Face’, P, p.223.  Ibid. 61  N, p.25. 62  N, p.27. 63  Sylvia Plath, ‘Lad Lazarus’, Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp.246–7. 64  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study, p.70. 65  Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.45. 66  Heaney, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.168. 67  Ibid. 68  Fran Brearton, ‘Heaney and the Feminine’, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.81. 59 60

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themes he is blind to is something that is extremely important to his later absorption of Elizabeth Bishop. ‘Bog Queen’ is also significant for evidencing a shift in Heaney’s use of American influence generally: whereas in the 1960s he turned to American poets for strength and took confidence in familiar themes, he is now looking to America to bring something back home to the matter of Ireland. In this regard, Lowell was the more useful example to Heaney, despite the fact that many of Lowell’s poems could be better described as vehicles for ‘the intense personal need of the poet’69 than Plath’s. Life Studies is the most obvious inspiration behind many of the stylistic choices in North, but Lowell’s Near the Ocean (1967) also appears to have provided some corroboration, not just because of its development of the ocean metaphor first used in ‘Quaker’ but for its defiance in the face of the external pressures applied to the poet. Lowell’s personal reflections on the volume’s difficult writing process indicates an intriguing parallel with Heaney as he determined to tackle equally public themes in North: [m]y next book, Near the Ocean, starts as public. I had turned down an invitation to an Arts Festival at the White House because of Vietnam. This brought more publicity than poems, and I felt miscast, felt burdened to write on the great theme, private though almost ‘global.’70

Given the reviews of Wintering Out as a volume that expressed ‘no politics’71 despite its stylistic developments, Heaney too may have felt ‘burdened to write on the great theme’; or, in his own words, to ‘reach out and go forward from a private domain and make wider connections, public connections.’72 In his writings Heaney praises Lowell’s public refusal of President Johnson’s invitation and even proclaims in one interview that Near the Ocean was ‘one of the greatest collections of poems in the last fifty years […] a kind of triumph of meter, of intelligence, and of morality.’73 Given this high level of personal admiration, it should not be at all surprising that Heaney’s North echoes Lowell’s Near the Ocean in its approach to history and atrocity.  Heaney, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.168.  Lowell, ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, Collected Prose, edited by Robert Giroux (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), pp.269–70. 71  Deane, ‘The Appetites of Gravity’, Sewanee Review, Winter (1976), p.203. 72  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.16. 73  Ibid. 69 70

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The bog poems of part I of North share a vocabulary with Near the Ocean’s title poem. The third stanza of Lowell’s ‘Near the Ocean’ would be at home in many of the poems of part I of North: Lost in the Near Eastern dreck, the tyrant and tyrannicide lie like bridegroom and the bride; the battering ram, abandoned, prone, beside the apeman’s phallic stone.74

In North, a ‘battering ram’,75 ‘bridegroom’76 and ‘insatiable bride’77 all play a part in Heaney’s colonial drama. ‘Near the Ocean’ works as a comparison particularly effectively with ‘Punishment’, the most controversial poem in North. To borrow Patricia Coughlan’s terms, Heaney’s method of combining ‘an erotic disrobing narrative (as in Renaissance and other love poetry) and a tone of compassionate tenderness’78 mirrors ‘Near the Ocean’. Indeed, ‘monster loved for what you are’79 approximates to Heaney’s victim, who he defines as a ‘Little adulteress’.80 Recalling the history-warping ocean of ‘Quaker’, Lowell’s sand in ‘Near the Ocean’ functions in the same way as Heaney’s bog. As history permeates the sand along which Lowell’s speaker walks, ancient wounds seep through the Bogside of ‘Punishment’ where history, to use a phrase from Lowell’s poem, can only speak the ‘present tense’.81 In attempting to possess some of Lowell’s signature command over his political theme, Heaney approaches the exploitation line in ‘Punishment’, leaving the reader with no answers to the tribal violence but rather questions, like to what extent should the poet exert ‘authority’82 over the past, and at what point does mastery become manipulation?

 RLCP, p.394.  ‘Act of Union’, N, p.43. 76  ‘The Betrothal of Cavehill’, N, p.45. 77  ‘Kinship’, N, p.34. 78  Patricia Coughlan, ‘“Bog Queens”: The Representation of Women in the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney’, New Casebooks: Seamus Heaney, edited by Michael Allen (London: Palgrave Macmillan), p.190. 79  RLCP, p.395. 80  N, p.30. 81  RLCP, p.395. 82  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.138. 74 75

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The depictions of RUC officers in part II of North also have precursors in Near the Ocean, where the police are depicted as criminals in their own right. In Lowell’s ‘The Opposite House’, a police officer is punningly ‘crooked / in the doorway, one hand on his revolver’ before more plod ominously into view. In ‘A Constable Calls’, the officer’s bicycle similarly becomes an extension of his threat, indicated by the aggressive-sounding, consonantal description of its ‘mud-splasher / Skirting the front mudguard’83 as the child-speaker stares at ‘the revolver butt.’ Like Lowell’s ‘Opposite House’, Heaney’s final image shows the officer’s menacing departure as ‘His boot pushed off / And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked’, an image in which danger is indicated by a confident, Lowell-like repetition.84 In Near the Ocean’s following poem, ‘Central Park’, Lowell creates an equivalency between the city’s ‘delinquents’ who brandish ‘knives’85 and the thuggish police officers who lie in wait with clubs. In fact, the central park of Near the Ocean becomes microcosmic of a violent society in which there is a contagion of paranoia: a contemporary America that has much in common with the Northern Ireland presented by part II of North.

ii Heaney’s friendship with Lowell strengthened around the time of North’s publication. Most notably during this period, Lowell attended the 1975 Kilkenny Arts Week as Heaney’s guest86 and presented Heaney the Duff Cooper Memorial award for poetry in 1976 (self-discharging himself from a private hospital in London to do so).87 But the terms of Lowell’s positive review of North proved controversial in Ireland,88 and the volume received some strong criticism at home. Heaney reflected in Stepping Stones that  N, p.61.  In the first stanza of Lowell’s ‘Fall 1961’, RLCP, p.329, the ‘grandfather clock’ goes ‘tock, tock, tock’; a similar repetition occurs in ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’ when the ‘cuckoo clock’ goes ‘Tockytock, tockytock’, RLCP, p.163. 85  RLCP, p.392. 86  SS, p.xxvi. 87  For an account of this incident see Meyers, ‘Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship’, p.454. 88  In a review of Station Island (1984), Paul Muldoon wrote that Heaney ‘should resist more firmly the idea that he must be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks from the power-crazed Robert Lowell’. Paul Muldoon, ‘Sweeney Peregrine’, London Review of Books, 1–14 November 1984, p.20. 83 84

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the negative reviews he received were in part an attempt ‘to draw attention to the commentator or the columnist rather than the work in question.’89 In the 1970s, however, he did not dismiss his critics so robustly; rather, his sensitivity to such criticism is indicated by his swerve away from the controversial style of North towards the elegiac forms of Field Work. During a discussion of his bog poems in 1979, Heaney reasons, ‘I want to pull back from all that because I have begun to feel a danger in that responsible, adjudicating stance towards communal experience’, adding, ‘I just feel an early warning system telling me to get back inside my own head.’90 Whatever else it may tell us about his relationship to Lowell, Heaney’s own sense of this time in his career is one perhaps put best by Eliot: ‘[i]t is often true that only by going too far can we find out how far we can go.’91 Due to the poets’ public friendship, the dedicated ‘Elegy’, and the Glanmore Sonnets sequence, Lowell’s influence was noted extensively in reviews of Field Work.92 Aside from his role as a formidable champion in print, Lowell provided Heaney feedback on draft versions of the Glanmore Sonnets prior to their publication. Lowell admired how they appeared to have ‘come through a grief’ but advised that they undergo a formal ‘knocking about’.93 Even the title of the volume itself, ‘Field Work’, is a reference to Lowell. As Tyler notes, the line ‘Now the good life could be to cross a field’ from Glanmore Sonnet I echoes Lowell’s ‘Hamlet in Russia, A Soliloquy’, where he writes ‘to live a life is not to cross a field’.94 Given that Field Work exhibits a more careful handling of Lowell’s influence than North, the volume’s title seems to accord with Lowell’s statement in ‘Hamlet in Russia’: the challenges of one’s personal life are more difficult than ‘crossing fields’ or writing poetry. This suggests Heaney, in his fifth volume of verse, is weighing up whether to ‘cross’ boundaries or  SS, pp.161–2.  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.17. 91  T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’, The third W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow, 24th February 1942 (Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Company, 1942), p.24. 92  Lowell’s influence throughout Field Work was noted in contemporary reviews by several commentators. One of the most noteworthy of these reviews by James Fenton’s who warned that Lowell’s influence on Heaney was dangerous. Fenton advised that the Irish poet avoid the ‘striving for greatness’ that ‘destroyed’ Lowell. Fenton, ‘A Dangerous Landscape’, Hibernia, 25 October, 1979, p.14. 93  SS, p.216. The influence of Lowell on Heaney’s sonnets is discussed in Chap. 7. 94  Tyler, A Singing Contest: Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, p.39; FW, p.28; RLCP, p.314. 89 90

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toe lines. Indeed, when the volume’s evocations of Lowell are considered in the wider context of the poets’ relationship, a picture of a complex influence emerges, one that has multiple tensions at its core. In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll conducted in 1979, Heaney admits that, ‘at one stage’, he had ‘envisaged [Field Work] as a book composed entirely of sonnets’,95 and therefore very much in the style of Lowell’s ’70s collections. In the same part-review part-interview, Heaney outlines his ambitions for Field Work in terms that strongly echo his later analyses of Lowell’s verse. He explains he wants ‘to use the first person singular, to use ‘I’ in the poems and make it closer to the ‘I’ of my own life […] that I use in conversation’, and not just ‘to bring the actual autobiographical facts more to the fore but to try to fortify them by some kind of technique […] in any poet with authority there is a declaration of the self as well as a divination of what produced the self.’96 Later, he credits Lowell for his success in precisely this task, explaining that it is the American poet’s ability to take the ‘intense elements of his own experience and [render] them symptomatic’97 that he venerates; his retention of a ‘social dimension’ despite his public themes, and his attainment of ‘authority not by the assimilation of literary tradition but upon the basis of the roused poetic voice.’98 By the late 1970s, then, even as the critical tide was beginning to turn against Lowell, Heaney recognised that certain elements of Lowell’s achievement could still be valuable sources on which to model an approach to public themes. In contrast to Lowell’s emboldening role in the political poems of North, in Field Work Heaney borrows heavily from Lowell’s elegiac form. While images and phrases of Lowell’s resonate strongly throughout North, in Field Work Heaney adopts different Lowellian tones and manners to fit each occasion. At times, Heaney’s admitted ‘Lowellizing’99 is not entirely successful, as in ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’. As both Hart and Cavanagh have noted, the poem aims for the dramatic impact of ‘For the Union Dead’, which Heaney himself has called one of the ‘finest public

 Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘In the Mid-Course of His Life’, Hibernia, 11 October, 1979, p.8.  Ibid. 97  Heaney, ‘Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry’, Critical Inquiry Vol. 7, No. 4 (Summer 1981), p.648. 98  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.138. 99  SS, p.218. 95 96

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poems of our time’.100 In one of the most comprehensive readings of ‘For the Union Dead’, Steven Gould Axelrod argues the poem ‘unites the personal, historical, political, and literary materials’101 and that, through the monument of Colonel Shaw, Lowell is able to confront ‘the ambiguities of the American past’.102 This is an apt description of Heaney’s aims for ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’, where he traces Ireland’s complex political history through the similarly memorialised soldier Francis Ledwidge. Characteristically, Lowell’s poem is successful because of his unapologetic ‘command’103—a word Heaney often uses to describe Lowell—and the willed convergence of histories, with the layers of the past becoming united in Lowell himself, as much as by the image of Colonel Shaw. Beginning with the boarded-up Boston Aquarian, Lowell soon widens his gaze to include Shaw’s monument. Lowell cleverly satirises William James’s description of the union soldiers as being ‘so true to nature that one can almost hear them breathing as they march’104 in a speech Axelrod describes as being ‘several notches more optimistic in [its] idealism than any of the major poems about Shaw dared to be.’105 Eviscerating James’s rhetoric, Lowell adds that Shaw’s body is now in ‘the ditch’, where he ‘was thrown’ along ‘with his “niggers”.’106 In this image, Shaw is re-memorialised not as a symbol of patriotic martyrdom but of man’s ‘power to choose life and die’, a suicidal note to puncture the earlier over-inflated rhetoric. The poise with which Lowell attacks the tradition of Shaw poetry points to his genuine family 100  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.140. Cavanagh describes ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ as a ‘wholly successful and moving poem’ that utilizes the ‘relaxed, loosely organized, seemingly extraneous anecdotal style, the “drifting style” that Lowell acknowledges he took from Elizabeth Bishop’, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics, p.114. Hart goes further, claiming Heaney’s poem ‘in some ways is a rewriting of Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”’, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), p.127. 101  Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), p.157. 102  Ibid., p.162. 103  Cavanagh notes Heaney’s uses of the word in ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, arguing that it ‘seems to mean several things’. See Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics, p.111. 104  William James, ‘Robert Gould Shaw’, Memories and Studies (London: Longmans, Green, 1911), p.40. Originally an oration at the Exercises in the Boston Music Hall, May 31, 1897. 105  Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art, p.168. 106  RLCP, p.376.

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connection to the memorial; the statue’s pedestal bears a line from his great-granduncle James Russell Lowell’s poem ‘Memoriae Positum’.107 Bridging past and present, the younger Lowell concludes his poem by meditating on the Hiroshima bombing and modern-day images of black American children, giving the poem its powerful contemporary resonance. When he credits Lowell’s sweeping historical treatments, Heaney often identifies an ‘authority’108 in the work that he feels derives from Lowell’s ancestry, describing him on one occasion as a ‘prince’109 and on another as a ‘silvered Brahmin from Boston’.110 As Cavanagh notes, much of Heaney’s admiration for Lowell is wrapped up in this idea of poetic ‘pedigree’.111 Ironically, it is Heaney’s inability to assume an equivalent role that problematises his attempted translation of ‘For the Union Dead’ into an Irish context. ‘Francis Ledwidge’ begins with a contrast between the ‘imagined wind’112 and the ‘real winds’ that ‘buff and sweep’ the ‘bronze soldier’. Like Lowell, Heaney incorporates a personal drama into his historical treatment, recalling how ‘Aunt Mary’ took him ‘Along the Portstewart prom’. The devices that feel spontaneous in ‘For the Union Dead’, however, feel affected in ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’. Perhaps self-­ conscious of his lack of Lowell’s ‘dynastic’ rights to ‘speak like a curator of American history’,113 Heaney overworks his smaller drama of childhood memory to legitimise his claim to the statue and the history it memorialises. The awkward phrase, ‘It all meant little to the worried pet / I was in nineteen forty-six or seven’, feels too knowing in its recreation of Lowell’s moral growth, while the sequence in which Ledwidge is imagined in his ‘Tommy’s uniform, / A haunted Catholic face’ commits the crime for which Lowell excoriates James: hearing the bronze statue breathe. 107  Elizabeth Bishop calls Lowell ‘the luckiest poet I know’ for the advantage of heritage, exclaiming ‘all you have to do is put down the names’ to appear ‘significant, illustrative, American etc.’ Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), p.247. 108  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.138. 109  Heaney, ‘On Robert Lowell’, web. 110  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.139. 111  Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics, p.111. Cavanagh notes Heaney’s admiration for Lowell’s ‘breeding’ is sometimes ‘a little vulgar’. 112  FW, p.57. 113  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.132.

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Heaney’s quatrains, much neater than Lowell’s, also fail to gather the same ominous momentum. One could argue that the clipped lines are Heaney’s deliberate attempt to dampen Lowell’s ‘triumphalism of tone’,114 supplanting what he terms ‘the high rhetorical mode’ for the ‘demotic and democratic’,115 but the close imitation of Lowell in the final stanzas suggests these lapses are the result of a general uneasiness in a Lowellian upper register. Heaney spells out what should be implied and offers the reader the ‘useless equilibrium’116 where the historical ‘strains / Criss-­ cross’. Ultimately, the author of ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ too often exposes himself as the awed reader of ‘For the Union Dead’, echoing many of its features without the sense of freedom and danger in which Lowell excels. This may be why Heaney decided to cut the fifth stanza for republication in New Selected Poems 1966–1987, a move which indicates how vulnerable he felt in this kind of public mode. Elsewhere in Field Work, a more intriguing chasm opens between Heaney and Lowell. In its extensive use of the elegy form, Field Work most obviously recalls Life Studies, a collection that, as Jahan Ramazani notes, is ‘dominated’ by elegies, ‘especially for [Lowell’s] father, mother, and grandfather.’117 Though Heaney refers to Lowell as ‘the master elegist’118 in his own deferentially titled ‘Elegy’, Lowell’s tributes are often barbed in a way that is very much at odds with Heaney’s style of elegy in Field Work. Ramazani argues Lowell’s father is the subject of ‘sustained attack in Life Studies’ with many poems designed to ‘humiliate his father’,119 whose resignation from the Navy and social fall was a source of family embarrassment. The personal style and loose forms of Life Studies are themselves weaponised against Lowell’s father, who is described in the book’s prose sequence as possessing ‘the dumb depth of one who trusted in statistics and was dubious of personal experience’120 and who ‘disdained the “effrontery” of Amy Lowell’s “free verse”’.121 Ramazani suggests that  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell’, p.315.  ‘Full Face’, P, p.221. 116  The phrase also recalls Lowell’s image of ‘an oasis in his air / of lost connections’ from ‘Memories West Street and Lepke’, RLCP, p.187. 117  Jahan Ramazani, ‘Lowell as Elegist’, The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), p.102. 118  FW, p. 31. 119  Ramazani, ‘Lowell as Elegist’, p.102. 120  RLCP, p.126. 121  Ramazani, ‘Lowell as Elegist’, p.103. 114 115

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Lowell, in this way, ‘prosecutes his “war” at the discursive level, making his style the “masculine” opposite of his father’s effeminacy.’122 One of the most celebrated poems in Field Work, ‘The Harvest Bow’, is a tribute to Heaney’s father, but it is a poem that lacks any malice; rather, it is a particularly tender record of a childhood memory. In a volume where Lowell is everywhere, ‘The Harvest Bow’ feels like a deliberate counterpoint to the elegies of Life Studies. The child speaker of ‘The Harvest Bow’ moves ‘between the railway slopes / Into an evening of long grass’ as his father begins ‘Whacking the tips of weeds and bushes’ with his ‘stick’.123 Heaney’s father is portrayed as an archetypal male figure, with ‘Hands that aged round ashplants’ in an affectionate portrait. Even the intricate plaiting of ‘the harvest bow’, an object that is reflective of the father’s laconic nature, is coarsened ‘as it tightens twist by twist’ in tightly-woven sestets. Indeed, in its flutter of percussive repetitions, the phrase ‘that original townland / Still tongue-­ tied in the straw tied by your hand’ implies the synergy between the poem and the bow. Invigorated by its own momentum, ‘The Harvest Bow’ then produces one of Heaney’s most often-quoted phrases: ‘The end of art is peace’.124 Reflective of the father-son relationship itself, the device is both ‘frail’ and robust (‘like a drawn snare’). Hart argues the poem ‘owes some of its pastoral quiet to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn”’. To this list, one could add not only Yeats’s ‘Samhain 1905’125 but Frost’s ‘The Exposed Nest’. In Frost’s poem, which also depicts a man and a child in a rural setting, freshly cut ‘hay’126 is willed into shape to help it ‘stay […] against the breeze’ and make a ‘screen’ for young birds in a kind of parable explanation of Frost’s definition of poetry as a ‘momentary stay against confusion.’127 Asked about the phrase ‘the end of art is peace’, Heaney’s explanation employs a highly Frostian use of the word ‘against’:

 Ibid., p.102.  FW, p.55. 124  FW, p.56. 125  Heaney has said he enjoys the ‘triple take’ of the line ‘The end of art is peace’, explaining ‘Coventry Patmore said it, Yeats used it and I used Yeats using it.’ Randy Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, No. 80 (1988), p.21. 126  RFCP, p.109. 127  Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.132. 122 123

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[t]he greatest art confronts every destructiveness that experience offers it and in Thomas Kinsella’s terms, ‘digests it.’ […] Can you write a poem […] that gives peace and tells horror? It gives true peace only if the horror is satisfactorily rendered. If the eyes are not averted from it. If its overmastering power is acknowledged and unconceded, so the human spirit holds its own against its affront and immensity. To me that’s what the ‘end of art is peace’ means and understood in those terms, I still believe it.128

There is thus significant intertextuality in ‘The Harvest Bow’; it is notable, then, that the chorus of influences this time does not include Lowell. Heaney’s later commentary on the poem and the high value he places on its key phrase indicates the extent to which his own ideals concerning poetry’s relationship to historical reality can lead him away from Lowell’s example, particularly the poems of Life Studies where the elegy form serves as part of the wider, ignoble effort to demean his father. An elegy in Field Work that does appear to have absorbed Lowell’s mannerisms is ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’. Cavanagh notes that Heaney borrows from Lowell the ‘series of adjectives’ and ‘heavy allusiveness, the ellipses, the practice of talking to people in poems, the occasional portentous questioning, the use of the unattributed quotation, and Lowell’s love of resounding closing lines.’129 ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ incorporates nearly all of these features very successfully. Beginning with lines from Dante’s ‘Purgatorio’,130 Heaney, with Lowellian mastery of pace and empathy, describes an imagined version of the real-life drama in which his second-cousin, Colum McCartney, is murdered. Bernard O’Donoghue calls these ‘haunting lines’131 while Neil Corcoran describes them as among the ‘most moving Heaney has written’.132 The section is particularly effective when Heaney anxiously lists the possible warnings leading up to McCartney’s last moments, such as the enjambed ‘stalling / Engine’, which cleverly recreates the scene and generates a dynamic mixture of rush and pause before the chiasmic ‘Where you weren’t known and far from  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, p.21.  Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics, p.114. 130  Heaney has spoken about the influence of Lowell’s translations on him during this period, claiming that if he ‘hadn’t encountered’ Lowell’s ‘Brunetto Latini’ canto in Near the Ocean, ‘there would be no ‘Ugolino’ in Field Work.’ See SS, p.218. 131  Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry, (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p.85. 132  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study, p.94. 128 129

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what you knew’.133 A similar ploy is used later when the ‘sweeping’ of ‘feet’ behind Heaney stops in a deadening midline pause before the funerary ritual in which he dabs McCartney ‘with moss / Fine as drizzle’. The flexibility and heightened literary tone of the final lines recalls Heaney’s descriptions of Lowell’s Day by Day poems as ‘shimmering’ with ‘a received literary language’134 and ‘freed but not footless, following the movement of the voice’.135 Indeed, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ shares its formula of poignant exposition, writerly supplication, and direct address with ‘For John Berryman’, where Lowell admits, painfully, ‘To my surprise, John, / I pray to not for you”.136 Ostensibly, then, it is odd that Heaney’s later self-rebuke in ‘Station Island’ for the literary indulgences of ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ is made through another Lowell-like manoeuvre. In ‘Station Island’, McCartney’s ghost chastises Heaney for being ‘with poets’ when he ‘got the word’ of his murder and for how he ‘whitewashed ugliness’ in the earlier poem where he ‘confused evasion and artistic tact’.137 The poet Heaney was ‘with’ when he got ‘word’ of McCartney’s death was in fact Lowell, whom Heaney hosted at the 1975 Kilkenny Arts week. But the phrase ‘you confused evasion and artistic tact’ has the ring of Lowell’s ‘Unwanted’, where he laments a time when he ‘was surer’ of ‘farfetched misalliance / that made evasion a revelation’.138 Perhaps Heaney in ‘Station Island’ is trying to summon some of the dramatic impact of ‘Dolphin’, where Lowell half-­ remorsefully writes ‘my eyes have seen what my hand did’,139 or the self-­ quarrelling ‘Epilogue’, where he asks himself, ‘why not say what happened?’;140 or maybe Heaney sees himself as similarly engaged in Lowell’s lifelong search for ‘the grace of accuracy’, an ideal for which the poet strives knowing that it can never be fully achieved. In response to O’Driscoll’s question about McCarthy’s ghostly reappearance in ‘Station Island’, ‘[d]id you really feel you had been guilty of over-aestheticizing his death, or was this a dramatic dialogue set up to explore the whole idea of

 FW, p.9.  ‘Full Face’, P, p.223. 135  Ibid., p.222. 136  RLCP, p.737. 137  SI, p.83. 138  RLCP, p.831. 139  RLCP, p.708. 140  RLCP, p.838. 133 134

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public poetry’, Heaney responds ‘[i]t was set up, exactly as you say.’141 So, though Heaney reprimands himself for ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ in ‘Station Island’, the later poem is, in another sense, a consolidation of the first, fortifying the poet’s right to turn the most personal matters of life into art. Given Heaney’s emphasis on Lowell’s poetic birth right and the sharp reference to him in ‘Station Island’ (‘you were with the poets’), it is clear that for Heaney Lowell exemplified a kind of muscular, sometimes troublemaking art-for-art’s-sake. An uncollected poem written around this time, ‘Pit Stop Near Castletown’, is highly revealing of Heaney’s ambivalence for this unapologetic element in Lowell, and perhaps his need to guard against a similar trait in himself. The poem, which epitomises their male comradery (‘pissing like men / Together and apart against the wall’),142 was eventually printed in 2003 and conflates ‘two things’ that happened on Lowell’s last visit to Heaney: ‘[o]ne was the stop we made near the gates of the demesne so that he and I could relieve ourselves by the side of the car; and the other was a quick coded exchange’.143 This ‘coded exchange’ concerned the imminent breakup of Lowell’s relationship with Caroline Blackwood.144 Three of the poem’s eight tercets focus on Heaney’s memorial address for Lowell, underscoring Heaney’s increased consciousness of the perception of their friendship in the aftermath of Lowell’s death. When Heaney admits in ‘Pit Stop’ to rising ‘Perhaps too highly’145 to the occasion, there is an acknowledgement of a misstep, suggesting that Heaney was beginning to sense a danger in assuming the public role he was positioned to inherit from Lowell. Heaney may have been thinking of Lowell when he gave the lecture, delivered the same year as his memorial address, ‘Yeats as an Example?’, a rhetorical title  SS, p.221.  ‘Pit Stop Near Castletown.’ Agni No. 57, 2003, p.4. 143  SS, p.219. Quoting her own interview with Heaney in 2004, Sally Connelly writes that Heaney did not write of the intimate details contained in ‘Pit Stop’ for ‘some years after Lowell’s death since he ‘didn’t want to appear to capitalize’ on his friendship with Lowell.’ See Connolly, Grief and Meter: Elegies for Poets after Auden (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2016), pp.159–90. 144  Marie Heaney writes ‘at that time literary gossip had it that Robert and Caroline’s marriage was coming to an end. We’d heard it from a couple of American participants at the Rotterdam Poetry Festival that we had been to earlier in the year, but I had no sense of that on that evening in Strand Road. I felt they were happy in each other’s company. However Seamus sensed something different.’ ‘Afterward’, Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry, p.264. 145  ‘Pit Stop Near Castletown.’ Agni No. 57, 2003, p.4. 141 142

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that he explains is ‘meant to acknowledge the orthodox notion that a very great poet can be a very bad influence on other poets.’146 In a sense, Heaney’s ‘Elegy’ demonstrates this very orthodoxy by over-­ quoting from its subject, elegising not just Lowell but Lowell’s style of elegy. Commentary on the poem has been mixed, with most critics sensing a note of uncertainty in the tribute.147 In the poem itself, Heaney begins by considering the advantages of living the ‘bold’148 life embodied by Lowell, recalling how the ‘master elegist’ had ‘sat / ten days ago’ where he presently writes. Like ‘Pit Stop’, ‘Elegy’ navigates Lowell’s difficulties carefully, praising him for ‘promulgating art’s / deliberate, peremptory / love and arrogance.’ These are hardly flattering terms, but they do contain a certain casuistry whereby Lowell’s negative attributes become ‘art’s’. More telling is the citation of ‘Dolphin’ in the following line, the title poem of a collection controversial for its use and manipulation of personal letters. In ‘Dolphin’, Lowell offers a measure of remorse, reflecting that he has ‘plotted too freely’ without ‘avoiding injury to others’.149 In his memorial address, Heaney says the poem’s final line ‘branded itself’ on him and that he discerns its ‘two musics that contend but do not overpower each other’, the ‘bronze note, and perhaps even brazen note, of artistic mastery’ as well as the note of ‘human remorse’ that recognises the ‘price which poetic daring involves’.150 It is this ‘poetic daring’ Heaney finally applauds in ‘Elegy’, though he again words this curiously, admiring Lowell for how he ‘bullied out / heart-hammering blank sonnets / of love for Harriet // and Lizzie’. In The Government of the Tongue, Heaney is similarly reluctant to confront the sense in which Lowell’s sonnets are problematic and mentions them only to explain they will not be the focus of his discussion,151 this despite his quite pejorative description of Plath’s ‘Daddy’ in the same critical volume as a poem ‘so entangled in biographical  P, p.109.  Hart argues ‘Elegy is ‘certainly no gullible obeisance to the American poet’, Poet of Contrary Progressions, p.124; Cavanagh discerns a desire to ‘rival’ Lowell, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics, p.114; Kennedy-Andrews reads ‘Elegy’ as ‘an interesting record of mixed feelings—both of hero-worship and an implicit sense that, pace Bloom, Heaney is determined to define his own style against that of Lowell’, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection, p.96. 148  FW, p.25. 149  RLCP, p.708. 150  Heaney, ‘On Robert Lowell’, web. 151  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.141. 146 147

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c­ ircumstances and rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy.’152 It is difficult to imagine such a positioning of Plath and Lowell receiving much support today. There is a clear moral dimension to the reproduction and manipulation of private material in The Dolphin which, in both prose and verse, Heaney avoids condemning. This is in sharp contrast to the wider criticism of The Dolphin by Bishop153 and Adrienne Rich, the latter of whom wrote of the title poem’s final lines: I have to say that I think this bullshit eloquence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, that it is presumptuous to balance injury done to others with injury done to oneself—and that the question remains, after all—to what purpose? The inclusion of the letter-poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry, one for which I can think of no precedent: and the same unproportioned ego that was capable of this act is damagingly at work in all three of Lowell’s books.154

Conversely, Heaney creates a position for himself from which he can admire Lowell for this ‘daring’ while at the same time acknowledging the pain it caused others. In ‘Elegy’ and elsewhere, Heaney depicts Lowell as a poet whose unwillingness to compromise was finally his undoing. Heaney recycles some of his terms for Lowell in one of Field Work’s most successful political poems, ‘Casualty’. Dedicated to Louis O’Neill, a local angler who was murdered in a bomb attack, ‘Casualty’ encapsulates the shift in Heaney’s poetic persona from the ‘artful voyeur’155 of atrocities to restrained elegist. Praised by critics, Heaney considers the poem to be a formal breakthrough as well. His various remarks about ‘Casualty’ in Stepping Stones are revealing of Lowell’s complex role in the poem’s composition. Admittedly using Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’ as a ‘tuning fork’ to ‘keep in step with’, Heaney dismisses O’Driscoll’s suggestion of ‘yielding too much’ to Yeats, replying ‘I was more conscious that I was  Heaney, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, GT, p.165.  Bishop wrote to Lowell: ‘One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just isn’t worth that much.’ Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, p.708. 154  Adrienne Rich, ‘On History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin’, The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, pp.186–87. 155  N, p.31. 152 153

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ventriloquizing for Robert Lowell.’156 Reflecting on the long period of revision, he explains, ‘I knew I would have to write something [for O’Neill], but wasn’t sure how it could be done’;157 the answer lay in devising ‘a new kind of poem’ that, through its ‘plotted shape, and the narrative and metrical built-upness’, allowed him to shift ‘from one position to another’.158 Heaney also invokes the poem during a discussion of the various categories of ‘political’, ‘civic’, and ‘public’ verse. Situating Lowell as a ‘public’ poet for rising ‘to the occasion of the res publica’,159 Heaney says he would like his own work to be ‘nominated for the ‘public’ slot’ too, concluding that ‘Casualty’ ‘is a public poem of the sort I’d aspire to.’160 While Yeats undoubtedly remained the more significant voice of poetic authority in Heaney’s mind, the bold repurposing of Yeats’s metre in ‘Casualty’ is itself a Lowell-like manoeuvre that indicates the multiple levels at which Lowell’s influence operated in Heaney. ‘Casualty’ is formally dexterous, with three sections that shift temporally, tonally, and in and out of rhyme schemes. In the opening section, the alternately rhymed trimetric lines aim to capture something of O’Neill’s character. O’Neill is described as ‘a dole-kept breadwinner / But a natural for work’161 with a ‘deadpan sidling tact’, terms that foster pathos while remaining open to the comic element. The poem’s conclusion is particularly moving: How culpable was he That last night when he broke Our tribe’s complicity? ‘Now, you’re supposed to be An educated man,’ I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me The right answer to that one.’162

Heaney links his artistic responsibilities with O’Neill’s culpability in his own murder for breaking his ‘tribe’s’ paramilitary curfew. It is a measure of Heaney’s confidence and ambition that he should enter this terrain and,  SS, p.194.  SS, p.214. 158  SS, p.215. 159  SS, p.385. 160  SS, p.386. 161  FW, p.14. 162  FW, p.16. 156 157

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in ‘Casualty’ at least, overcome his anxiety to shut down into definite conclusions. His formal choices in ‘Casualty’ indicate a rising confidence as well. Corcoran considers the poem in relation to Yeats’s ‘Fisherman’, noting, ‘not only do both involve fishermen, but they share a metre and the subtle and tactical deployment of pararhyme, although Heaney varies the rhyme scheme itself.’163 Considering Heaney’s comment that he was more ‘conscious’ of ‘ventriloquizing for Lowell’ in ‘Casualty’—and Lowell’s comment that Heaney was the best Irish poet since Yeats—it seems that Lowell’s influence is at work beneath the Yeatsian surface of the poem’s metre. Indeed, Heaney’s description of O’Neill recalls his portrait of Lowell in ‘Elegy’, where the phrase ‘the fish-dart of your eyes’ echoes O’Neill’s ‘fisherman’s quick eye’. Heaney’s description of O’Neill’s ‘turned back’ watching his ‘tentative art’164 also recalls the terms of his Oxford Companion essay for Lowell, where he notes the age’s preference for ‘tentative art’ over Lowell’s ‘overweening triumphalism of tone’.165 Absorbing and applying these critical terms in ‘Casualty’, Heaney effectively charts a route through Lowell’s extremes, harmonising the ‘timorous’ and the ‘bold’166 within himself by being neither too ‘tentative’ nor too ‘triumphant’.167

iii Heaney’s ‘The Skunk’ is also clearly in dialogue with Lowell, though it is difficult to define the precise nature of the conversation between the poets. Asked by Randall about the relationship between his skunk poem and Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, Heaney responds that his own is a ‘kindlier, slinkier one altogether.’168 This ambiguity has allowed critics to speculate about the various connections between the poems. Blake Morrison discerns ‘a very Lowell-like title’169 at work while Hart observes ‘The Skunk’, through fleeting references to holy rituals, ‘has some of the religious connotations 163  Corcoran, ‘Heaney and Yeats’, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.172. 164  FW, p.15. 165  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell,’ p.315. 166  ‘Elegy’, FW, p.25. 167  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell,’ p.315. 168  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.21. 169  Blake Morrison, ‘The Hedge-School: Field Work’, Modern Critical Views: Seamus Heaney, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), p.137.

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of’ Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, though ‘Heaney is more contented, and more enthusiastic than Lowell about the religious alliance of sacred and profane, Christian and pagan.’170 More recently, William Logan has argued that Heaney’s poem ‘is not a direct answer to Lowell’, rather ‘it lives in the shadow of “Skunk Hour”’, existing ‘in quiet and helpless counter-­ argument.’171 Cavanagh offers a comprehensive reading of the two poems based largely on Hart’s insights, arguing that Heaney in ‘The Skunk’ offers ‘a Catholic’s vision to rival a Protestant’s’172 and that the Catholic rebuttal encompasses various forms of ‘fidelity […] fidelity to the humble speaking objects of the world around him, fidelity to an Irish way of seeing things, and fidelity to wife.’173 Cavanagh’s is a compelling reading, and certain of Heaney’s interview comments support it. For instance, when asked by Cole why Lowell says, ‘I’ll pray for you’ in ‘Elegy’, Heaney responds that this incident is reported as it actually occurred, and that he believes it was Lowell’s ‘way of saying, “I was once a Catholic too”’.174 In interview with Helen O’Shea Heaney goes further: Really, he was an artist; but he was an artist who wasn’t shy of the area of public affairs. And I think there was a kind of deep, moral kind of Protestant searching for a role in the world. And I think that’s really what, in an unspoken kind of way, the tutorship that Lowell gave me was: not to be afraid of the mess that I had got into [.]175

It appears, then, that Lowell’s Protestantism certainly shaped how Heaney perceived him and that it was a factor in their relationship. But by the time of Field Work Heaney had, as Cavanagh suggests, in a sense become Lowell’s elder by outliving him,176 and could see the ways in which his legacy was being challenged in a new critical landscape. In Heaney’s view, Lowell’s reputation suffered in the ‘period when the poetics of  Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions, p.131.  William Logan, ‘Lowell’s Skunk, Heaney’s Skunk’, Salmagundi, No. 177 (Winter 2013), p.100. 172  Ibid., p.138. 173  Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics, p.144. Cavanagh notes Lowell was not faithful to his wife while on academic appoint but Heaney, who composed ‘The Skunk’ while away from his wife on appointment in the University of California, was. 174  Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Art of Poetry’, web. 175  Helen O’Shea, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Quadrant 25 (1981), p.13. 176  Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics, p.142. 170 171

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indeterminacy were in the ascendant, and critics were intent upon exposing the discriminations entailed by a writer’s gender or minority status’, thus ‘Lowell’s “canonical” steadfastness and cultural certitudes did not win many advocates.’177 Heaney’s greater self-consciousness puts him in a position to correct Lowell, and in ‘The Skunk’ he seems to do so by pointing not to the tutorship given to him by Lowell, but to that given to Lowell by Bishop, his close friend and dedicatee of ‘Skunk Hour’. ‘Skunk Hour’ begins with a description of a New England coastal town in decline that progresses in loosely arranged, conversational stanzas. Moving from the flat, seemingly aimless descriptions of the opening stanzas, the speaker emerges in a car park where he watches ‘love-cars’ while ‘A car radio bleats’.178 Finding no salvation in the ‘Trinitarian Church’, the speaker identifies with the squalor of the skunks. Hugh B. Staples argues this palpable sense of anguish here ‘arises not so much out of a departure from reality as from an overly sensitive appreciation of its sordidness’.179 Essentially, Lowell’s sexually deprived speaker envies the skunks for their freedom of consciousness and their obliviousness to their condition. Despite the similar title, Heaney’s ‘The Skunk’ is in many ways the opposite of ‘Skunk Hour’. Set in California, the nightly skunk, which we are asked to read as Heaney’s absent wife, does not highlight isolation but rather connects the speaker to the human world. The feelings of sexual longing and loneliness (‘The aftermath of a mouthful of wine / Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow’)180 are described in a sensual language that is very much at odds with Lowell’s abject descriptions. An overlooked instance of intertextuality in the final stanza of ‘The Skunk’ provides the clue necessary to understanding the link between the poems: It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.181

Here, as the speaker brings the reader from California to the marital bedroom in intoxicated sensory description, the ‘head-down, tail-up hunt’  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell,’ p.315.  RLCP, p.192. 179  Hugh B.  Staples, Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p.83. 180  FW, p.45. 181  FW, p.45. 177 178

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references the poem that Lowell claims inspired his breakthrough in ‘Skunk Hour’: Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’, where, after a stray lantern burns the hillside, ‘a glistening armadillo left the scene, / rose-flecked, head down, tail down’.182 Lloyd Schwartz has noted the confusion surrounding the dedications of ‘Skunk Hour’ and ‘The Armadillo’ and corrects the widespread misconception that Bishop’s poem is a response to Lowell’s.183 In truth, ‘Skunk Hour’ was inspired by ‘The Armadillo’, a poem which originally appeared in the New Yorker in June 1957. When it was later collected in Questions of Travel (1965), Bishop merely reciprocated Lowell’s dedication. Lowell credits the ‘rhythms, idiom, images, and stanza structure’ of ‘The Armadillo’ for liberating him from his constraining style, even calling it ‘a much better poem’184 than his own. As well as engaging Lowell’s ‘searching’ Protestantism in ‘The Skunk’, Heaney seems to be responding to the sense in which ‘Skunk Hour’ was a significant moment in Lowell’s career, when he abandoned, in Lowell’s own words, the ‘distant, symbol-ridden, and wilfully difficult’ style of his earlier poems. Lowell goes on to explain that his earlier poems ‘hid what they were really about, and many times offered a stiff, humourless, and even impenetrable surface.’ He felt that ‘Skunk Hour’, with the drifting, more flexible voice it takes from Bishop, enabled this needed ‘breaking through’ of ‘the shell of my old manner’.185 But to what end does Heaney reference Bishop’s poem, Lowell’s source, when ‘The Skunk’ is so different from both ‘Skunk Hour’ and ‘The Armadillo’? Complicating this picture further, commentary on Heaney’s ‘The Skunk’ has tended to be split rather severely between those who praise it as a tender love poem and those who criticise it for its suggestions of phallic power through comic display and condescension.186 Heaney emphasises the intended ‘playful element’187 of ‘The Skunk’, and his defence of the poem may suggest the quality that he feels most distinguishes it from Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ and  EBCP, p.103.  Lloyd Schwartz, ‘Dedications: Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” and Bishop’s “The Armadillo”’, Salmagundi, No. 141/142 Winter/Spring 2004, p.121. Web. 184  Lowell, Robert Lowell Collected Prose, p.227. 185  Lowell, Robert Lowell Collected Prose, p.227. 186  Christopher Ricks describes ‘The Skunk’ as ‘an exquisitely comic love-poem […] No offense meant; no offence launched’, ‘Review of Field Work’, New Casebooks: Seamus Heaney, p.100; Patricia Coughlan argues the poem is ‘a classic example’ of the ‘genial voyeurism’ that characterises Heaney’s ‘love poems in general’, Ibid., p.200. 187  SS, p.204. 182 183

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most firmly aligns it with the poetry of Bishop, in whom he sees humour and humility, ‘manners’188 and restraint. As we have already seen through the careful terms of ‘Casualty’, Heaney in Field Work also wants his poetry to be understood this way: as a ‘tentative art’,189 and one that knows it is being watched. While Lowell’s influence became much less visible on his poetry in the years after Field Work, Heaney continued to avoid the more difficult questions about aspects of Lowell’s achievement. In Stepping Stones, Heaney describes Lowell as ‘the last American to be a dual citizen of the university and the world beyond it’ and as a figure of ‘authority as well as celebrity.’190 As Heaney too became ‘at home in Harvard’191 and as his own stature rose, the decline of Lowell’s once towering reputation offered another kind of example, one against which to measure success and calculate risk. Asked by O’Driscoll if the age’s preference for Bishop over Lowell surprises him, Heaney responds no, ‘Lowell is taking the punishment that’s always handed out to the big guy eventually’.192 This comment suggests that Lowell’s uncompromising streak continued to be a source of strength for Heaney as he too took punishment. Lowell’s influence, therefore, has the quality that Heaney argues in his Nobel speech is that of poetry itself: the ‘power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it’.193 Here, at the apex of his own ‘authority’ and ‘celebrity’, Heaney identifies a moral good in the ‘vulnerable’ part of our consciousness. The difficulty he fails to square is that, in Lowell’s hands, this ‘power’ is often exerted over, rather than for, the ‘vulnerable’ part in which the moral good resides.

 ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.101.  FW, p.15. 190  SS, p.273. 191  SS, p.273. 192  SS, p.280. 193  CP, p.467. 188 189

CHAPTER 5

The Walk on Air: Heaney and Bishop

In the 1980s and 1990s, Elizabeth Bishop emerges as a major influence on Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Despite the two poets’ brief friendship after Heaney replaced Bishop on the Harvard faculty, his endorsement of her work in the title essay of The Government of the Tongue (1988) and the dedicated ‘Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop’ from his Oxford lecture series, later collected in The Redress of Poetry (1995), the relationship between Heaney and Bishop has received little attention. In The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2009), Bishop warrants only four brief mentions, while in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop (2014) Heaney is cited only as a colleague of Bishop’s at Harvard during her final year and as an advocate of her achievement. Indeed, aside from a 1992 doctoral dissertation exploring the workings of animal imagery in Heaney and Bishop’s poetry, the attention given to the connection has been limited to the citation of Heaney’s approval of Bishop, and there has been a lack of comparative readings of their poetry or consideration of the specific terms in which he endorses her. On Heaney’s side of the Atlantic, Tom Paulin has noted, ‘[t]he formal authority and the subtlety of the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon often carries an invisible tribute to a poet [Bishop] who is often described as a poet’s poet’.1 However, as Jonathan Ellis has recently 1

 Tom Paulin, ‘The Poet’s Poet’, The Irish Times, 11 September, 2004. Web.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7_5

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observed, ‘Bishop’s influence on Irish poetry is not as “invisible” as Paulin would have us believe’.2 Bishop’s influence is noticeable on Heaney’s poems and critical writings while he was teaching in Harvard, where he was ambivalent about the prevailing literary critical atmosphere. Heaney’s increased engagement with Eastern European poetry is evident in The Haw Lantern (1987), but in several poems there are signs that a common ground is emerging between Heaney and Bishop. In Heaney’s next volume, Seeing Things (1991), there are clearer instances of Bishop’s influence on Heaney’s imagery and use of perspective, while in The Spirit Level (1996) there is an increased synergy between Heaney’s poems and his critical treatment of Bishop, where he offers readings that evidence a thoughtful engagement with her work. However, given the quite different terms in which Bishop is understood today, owing in large part to posthumous publications, we are now able to consider the critical lens through which Heaney viewed Bishop, and how far the image of her from which he draws influence is of his own making. The context in which Bishop emerges as significant to Heaney is critical to understanding that influence. Heaney read her work in the 1960s and taught her poems as practical criticism at Queen’s University before the two would become friends in the spring of 1979 when he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, after which they maintained contact until she died in October of that year. Heaney recalls he had ‘got to know her [Bishop] and Alice Methfessel’3 during that spring semester; in a February 9, 1979 letter to Dorothee Bowie, Bishop describes Heaney as ‘nice and very Irish’,4 and in a March 1 letter adds, ‘I like his poetry a lot’ and, despite avoiding ‘readings whenever I can’, she ‘did like Heaney’s readings’.5 In 1984, Heaney took a tenured position at Harvard as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, a position he held until 1996 when he became Emerson Poet in Residence, a nonteaching position he held until 2006. Since Heaney’s death in 2013, rooms one through twelve of Adams 2  Jonathan Ellis, ‘Elizabeth Bishop in Ireland: From Seamus Heaney to Colm Tóibín’, Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p.307. Ellis’s essay is to date the most thorough discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s connections with Irish poetry. 3  SS, p.277. 4  Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p.630. 5  Ibid., p.632.

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House, where Heaney resided at Harvard, have been dedicated as the ‘Heaney Suite’, with items of furniture chosen by Helen Vendler, Heaney’s Harvard colleague, friend and powerful champion who has played a key role in shaping conceptions of Heaney and Bishop’s legacy since their deaths. Bishop’s rising importance to Heaney in his Harvard phase largely follows the same trajectory as Lowell’s influence in the 1970s. As he did with Lowell, Heaney shared drafts of his poetry with Bishop, dedicated an essay to her work, and wrote a tribute poem, ‘A Hank of Wool; i.m. Elizabeth Bishop’, which was published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1980. The holdings at the Bishop archives in Vassar show that Heaney posted her the tribute poem along with several others: ‘A Villanelle for Marie’, ‘A Toy for Catherine’, ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’, ‘A Peacock’s Feather’, ‘A Cart for Edward Gallagher’, ‘A Deer in Glanmore’, ‘Near Anahorish: A Visitation’, ‘New Worlds’, and ‘Late Offerings’. Aside from ‘A Hank of Wool’, many of the poems contained in the folder are dedications. In the cover letter Heaney explains: I’ve an idea that some day I might do a collection called ‘Giveaways’ and these poems, or some of them, would be included. Each one would be dedicated to, and have some integral connection with what they used to call in Berkeley “a real human being.” I’ve done a number of these since coming to America, and the Villanelle, Hank of Wool and Late Offerings since coming here.6

The ‘Giveaway’ collection Heaney mentions never materialised and, given the date of this letter, it is tempting to view this unrealised ambition as an instance of Heaney second-guessing a Lowell-like gesture. On the cover note, Heaney describes ‘A Hank of Wool’ as ‘not good enough but has one or two images which we probably share.’ Several of the other poems contain what might be called shared features, most obviously ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’, which makes use of airy imagery similar to many Bishop poems,7 while ‘A Villanelle for Marie’ immediately stands out as Bishop-like because the form is so strongly associated with her achievement today. 6  Listed as folder 5.1 Heaney, Seamus, 1979 (1 letter, 1 postcard)’ in the Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives & Special Collections Library, Vassar College; the ‘here’ might refer to the Flanagans’ house on Long Island, where he was staying in the summer of 1979. See SS, p.277. 7  See Chap. 6.

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In his recent study of Bishop, Irish author Colm Tóibín writes: [i]n certain societies, including rural Nova Scotia where Bishop spent much of her childhood, and in the southwest of Ireland where I am from, language was also a way to restrain experience, take it down to a level where it might stay.8

This shared cultural tendency to restrain experience through language may have motivated Heaney’s choice of metaphor in ‘A Hank of Wool’, where poetry becomes a form of weaving that enmeshes imagined scenes and private memories. In the final tercet, this process is what connects Bishop to Heaney: i ‘Hank?’ you’ve said already, all tact and masquerade. ‘Sounds like a name for a cowboy.’ But don’t you remember holding wool— shop wool, ticketed bought wool— until your shoulders ached? I would sit like a hermit with my two arms held out to stretch the hank between them.9

As Ellis notes, ‘A Hank of Wool’ invokes Bishop in multiple senses, using a ‘Bishopesque’10 tripartite structure and alluding to many of her poems. On the page beneath the poem, Heaney writes ‘with love from Seamus 12 July 1979’, adding ‘Philip Larkin is the knitter, by the way.’ Though it was published just one year later, there are several changes between the versions Heaney sent to Bishop and the one published in 1980. Aside from alterations to certain phrases that reflect Bishop’s death (‘you should be in a cardigan’ becomes ‘come back in a cardigan’), the main difference between the versions is the ending. In the published  Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p.2.  Listed as folder 5.1 Heaney, Seamus, 1979 (1 letter, 1 postcard)’ in the Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives & Special Collections Library, Vassar College; the ‘here’ might refer to the Flanagans’ house on Long Island, where he was staying in the summer of 1979. See SS, p.277. 10  Ellis, ‘Elizabeth Bishop in Ireland’, p.310. 8 9

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poem, Heaney omits the tercet about the ‘English poet’ and instead incorporates an anecdote Bishop shared with him after reading the first draft: to the doll’s afghan in different coloured squares your grandmother who ‘knitted things for soldiers’ taught you to do, with little sermons. ‘But I resisted this. So then I would unravel lots of rows– and I’ve never knitted since.’11

In his Stepping Stones interviews, Heaney explains he sent the poem as ‘a gesture of homage to Elizabeth’;12 the poem, he felt, ‘was OK as a personal salute, maybe, but I just didn’t think it got a proper purchase.’13 He recalls he ‘then got a letter from her […] telling how her grandmother in Nova Scotia had taught her to knit […] little coloured squares that would be stitched together into patchwork items to send to soldiers.’14 Ellis notes that Heaney captures Bishop’s voice in other ways in the poem, such as ‘the “Click. Click.” of “The Bight”, the fireflies from the end of “A Cold Spring”, [and] the “map-makers’ colors” from, of course, “The Map”’.15 As Heaney intimates in his interview and cover note, overall the poem feels slightly uneasy and, in its use of dialogue and naming, has some of the same problems as ‘Elegy’, the poem written just one-year prior that suffers from being too influenced by Lowell’s own elegies and dedicated sonnets in History (1973). Indeed, it is telling that ‘Elegy’ for Lowell was collected in Field Work but not included in subsequent collected poems editions; ‘A Hank of Wool’ was published but never collected.

 ‘A Hank of Wool’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 March, 1980, p.261.  The images also echo an anecdote of Heaney’s about ‘a girl who now and again used to come across the fields at night to visit us’ and ‘darn holes in any old socks […] as she talked the bright needle picked up the stitches and carried the wool, criss-cross, criss-cross, over and under, back and forward […] I hope I darned my poems as well as she darned those socks, criss-crossing my lines in verses and stitching them up with ideas and rhymes.’ Originally from a Northern Ireland Schools radio programme ‘People at Work’ and published as ‘A Poet’s Childhood’ in Listener, 11 November, 1971, pp.660–61. 13  SS, p.278. 14  Ibid. 15  Ellis, ‘Elizbeth Bishop in Ireland’, p.311. 11 12

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In other respects, Bishop differs in crucial ways from Heaney’s previous exemplars. Firstly, Heaney positions Bishop as being stylistically antithetical to Lowell in several of his critical readings of her work. Her sparse publication history—just four collections in her lifetime—and her lack of overt political statements led Heaney to understand Bishop in the traditional view as a ‘tentative’16 and ‘reticent’17 poet, in contrast to Lowell’s ‘overweening triumphalism’.18 In an interview from 1979, Heaney is open about the ‘danger’ in taking ‘that responsible, adjudicating stance towards communal experience’ that characterised his political poetry of the 1970s, adding ‘I just feel an early warning system telling me to get back inside my own head.’19 Bishop’s achievement at this time, then, may have offered Heaney an example of how a verse could dedicate itself to, in Ellis’s words, ‘understanding home more deeply’,20 but without the ‘danger’21 of the more confrontational political style epitomised by Lowell. Indeed, Ellis observes the sense of ‘home’ Bishop shares with Irish writers, arguing ‘it is easy to see why Bishop’s hybrid, hyphenated, self-consciously untidy poetry appealed to writers living on an island frequently divided, like her first book, North & South, into historically charged regions’.22 While the opaque and parabolic nature of many poems in The Haw Lantern indicates Heaney’s clear desire to shed elements of his earlier manner, many of the poems also reflect his disenchantment with the experimental contemporary poetry and the climate of critical theory that surrounded him, and Bishop earlier, at Harvard. Despite spending much of his career there, across his prose and interviews Heaney has given mixed reports about this period of his life in America, recalling his varied commentary on his experiences at the University of California in 1970–71. In conversation with O’Driscoll, he remembers his wariness of ‘all the speechifying and theory-speak’ life in the ‘milieu of the Harvard English department’23 entailed, while in an earlier article he describes how much of the 16  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell’, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English, edited by Ian Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.315. 17  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.101. 18  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell,’ p.315. 19  James Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1979, p.17. 20  Ellis, ‘Elizabeth Bishop in Ireland’, p.307. 21  Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.17. 22  Ellis, ‘Elizabeth Bishop in Ireland’, p.308. 23  SS, p.287.

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‘idiom of deconstruction and the challenges of theory’ were ‘coming in one ear’ and ‘would pass through the other’.24 These kinds of statements echo his remarks about getting to grips with Olsonian poetics at the beginning of the 1970s in California, but in the earlier phase Heaney was at least determined to engage with contemporary poets and their unfamiliar poetics. By contrast, his discussions of his significantly longer period at Harvard lack commentary on specific American poets of the era. Heaney’s attitude to much American poetry during this period can be summed up by his comments in a 1988 interview where he describes ‘the American ear’ as ‘fluid and spread’; but ‘my predisposition and my prejudice is toward poetry that contains and practices force within a confined area’, and that is why he ‘can understand immediately the aims of the poetry of someone like Elizabeth Bishop’.25 He explains that after ‘justly opening’ himself to alternative poetics in Berkeley, he now feels ‘there comes a point when honesty to your prejudice is as proper as attempts to overcome it.’26 As generalised as these comments may be, they provide some context for The Haw Lantern, a collection that includes a sonnet sequence—eight poems written in a ‘confined area’—and invocations of Eastern European poets. While at Harvard, then, there is again a paradox at work in Heaney’s navigation of American poetry: the periods in which one might reasonably expect to find evidence of more American influence are often the least fruitful. Indeed, as Rosie Lavan has noted in her recent study, despite ‘teaching successive generations of students’, serving ‘on staff committees’ and contributing ‘to major events in the history of the institution’,27 America for Heaney in this phase largely ‘became a catalyst in his absorption of poetry in translation, and particularly the work of the poets from central and eastern Europe, among them Miłosz.’28 Heaney’s appreciation for Miłosz’s achievement is well-known,29 and in Stepping Stones he recalls attending Miłosz’s Norton lecturers on Harvard campus30 while, in The Government of the Tongue, he includes several essays on Eastern European poetry  Heaney, ‘Threshold and Floor’, Metre, Vol. 7, No. 8, (Spring–Summer 2000), p.267.  Randy Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, No. 80, 1988, p.17. 26  Ibid. 27  Rosie Lavan, Seamus Heaney and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p.98. 28  Ibid., p.114. 29  See Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for all Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012). 30  SS, p.301. 24 25

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(alongside his discussions of American poets Bishop, Lowell, and Plath). In interview with Brandes, he describes The Haw Lantern as being written in a voice that ‘isn’t quite my voice’; the volume’s poems are akin to ‘pseudo-translations from some unspecific middle European language’.31 This quality is clear in ‘The Stone Verdict’—at one point the volume’s title poem—32 which speaks of a ‘disdain of sweet talk’, a reference to the ‘speechifying and theory-speak’33 surrounding Heaney at Harvard: Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses, It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.34

A poem about Heaney’s father, whom he often described humorously as very laconic, ‘The Stone Verdict’ also captures the sense in which Heaney, too, was ‘maimed by self-doubt’ in a new climate where, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘the poetics of indeterminacy were in the ascendant’.35 This anxiety about what he calls in ‘The Mud Vision’ the ‘post factum jabber’ of ‘experts’36 runs through many poems in The Haw Lantern, some of which hint at Bishop’s growing significance to Heaney. Delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa poem for 1984, the volume’s first poem, ‘Alphabets’, delves back into childhood memories and maps the journey from ‘school’ to the ‘wooden O’ where he now stands, able to allude ‘to Shakespeare’ and ‘Graves’.37 As Michael Allen posits, this literary figure standing in the ‘O’ is ‘presumably Heaney lecturing at Harvard where he is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry’, a position which has helped him ‘get his highest circulation figures yet’.38 One hears a trace of the precocious six-year-old speaker from Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’ (‘I could read’)39 when Heaney explains his English exercises were ‘Marked correct’ and  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, p.18.  Heaney tells Brandes he decided against the original title because ‘Richard Murphy had a book called The Price of Stone and I thought to bring out a book entitled The Stone Verdict would be susceptible to the wrong interpretation’, Ibid., p.8. 33  SS, p.287. 34  HL, p.17. 35  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell,’ p.315. 36  HL, p.49. 37  HL, p.2. 38  Michael Allen, ‘Holding Course’, The Irish Review (Cork), 1988, No. 3 (1988), p.115. 39  EBP, p.179. 31 32

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that Latin ‘rose up in him’40 at school. Indeed, his classroom’s ‘globe’ has the same function as Bishop’s ‘National Geographic’41 in the dentist’s waiting room: both represent portals to a bigger, adult world beyond the child’s comprehension. In its valorisation of the child-poet’s ability to transcribe the world in language, however, ‘Alphabets’ betrays Heaney’s anxiety about the relationship between word and thing, the ‘[g]ravity’ that had ‘been kicked’, as he explains in his prose, in the new climate of deconstruction: ‘even the word gravid, with all those associations of ponderous physicality on its umbilical leash, had been disconnected by the image of a floating astronaut, lolling weightlessly.’42 Correspondingly, as its final image ‘Alphabets’ offers the earth as a ‘lucent O’43 outside the astronaut’s window. The terms echo the ‘pools of lucent sound’ from ‘A Deer in Glanmore’,44 a poem Heaney sent to Bishop. In Stepping Stones, Heaney recalls that Bishop particularly enjoyed this phrase; he may even have been hoping ‘The Deer in Glanmore’ would resonate with her because its central image—‘the deer of poetry’—evokes ‘The Moose’, a poem which was also delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa poem in 1972. Indeed, in its use of a familiar childhood theme and its formal association with the shared Harvard context, ‘Alphabets’ feels a little like the poems Heaney sent Bishop in 1979, in that one senses he is seeking some empathy or support from her, though it is difficult to define the exact nature of her influence. The ambivalence for the critical atmosphere evident in poems like ‘Alphabets’, ‘The Stone Verdict’, and ‘The Mud Vision’ complicates the critical narrative of Heaney’s easy ride to the top of the poet-critic elite at Harvard. Writing in 1986, Colin Campbell describes attending a Harvard event where Heaney ‘recited some of his verses, which sounded as if Yeats had come back to life; and then, Helen Vendler, a professor of English, told everyone what Heaney meant.’45 A few years later, Desmond Fennell claimed that Heaney had successfully ‘nudged aside John Ashbery to

 HL, p.1.  EBP, p.179. 42  Heaney, ‘Threshold and Floor’, p.267. 43  HL, p.3. 44  Bishop folder 84.5, in the Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives & Special Collections Library, Vassar College. 45  Allen refers to this article as Dialogue 76, 2, 1987. However, it appears that the article first appeared as ‘The Harvard Factor’ in the New Yorker July 20, 1986. 40 41

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succeed Robert Lowell as the poet laureate of the academy’.46 Cementing his place in the University, Harvard awarded Heaney an honorary degree in 1998.47 Despite Harvard’s clear acceptance of Heaney, it is notable that his close relationships there were with non-Americans, namely Miłosz, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky—all ‘expatriate poets’,48 in Neil Corcoran’s phrase. Heaney recalls feeling like an outsider at Harvard, telling O’Driscoll that he and Marie never considered relocating to Cambridge, and that he felt ‘more like a lighthouse keeper than an emigrant’, spending ‘[f]our months on, eight ashore.’49 Bishop was something of an outsider at Harvard, too. She tended to avoid public readings and failed to compete with Lowell, ‘Harvard’s headliner’,50 for the top creative writing talent. Megan Marshall, a former student, recalls that Bishop’s ‘literature seminars attracted only a handful of students’, with many being ‘put off by her requirement to memorize poetry each week and unimpressed by her attention to the surface action— the “subject matter”—of the poems discussed in class.’ Moreover, she ‘refused to teach the poetry of John Ashbery’ despite his popularity, ‘saying she couldn’t understand him’. In Lowell’s phrase, this was the ‘“age of poet-teachers”’ but, for Marshall at least, ‘Bishop wasn’t one of them.’51 Heaney also recalls being able to ‘make nothing of’52 Ashbery in the 1970s and has on several occasions described himself as an ‘amateur’53 at a­ cademic teaching. Rosalie O’Brien Kivlehan, one of Heaney’s former Harvard students, remembers him fondly but writes that it was his personal warmth

46  Desmond Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1. (Dublin: ELO Publications, 1991), p.7. 47  Noted in Corydon Ireland, ‘Heaney’s death caught “the heart off guard”’, The Harvard Gazette, August 30, 2013, web. 48  Corcoran argues: ‘Much as Heaney admires, then, some American poets who are more or less his contemporaries—Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Frank Bidart, for instance—he feels most affinity in the States, with three expatriate poets: Derek Walcott from the Caribbean; Joseph Brodsky from Russia; and Czeslaw Milosz from Poland’. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p.260. 49  SS, p.267. 50  Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), p.95. 51  Ibid., p.280. 52  SS, p.280. 53  SS, p.104.

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rather than his ‘academic prowess’ that she remembers.54 In his own words, Heaney recalls that his ‘lectures and tutorials’ were ‘very far from the kind of lingo and professional theory-speak that a young academic has to master nowadays.’55 Despite Heaney’s long association with Harvard and its role in institutionalising him in America, it appears in both the poems from this era and his interview remarks that he was, like Bishop, not entirely at ease with aspects of his University role. The poems of The Haw Lantern reflect the events in Heaney’s life at this time in other ways, too, most significantly the death of his mother, who is commemorated in the volume’s ‘Clearances’ sequence. The eight ‘Clearances’ sonnets rank today among Heaney’s most popular and critically acclaimed works, with sonnet 3 of the sequence being voted Ireland’s best-loved poem for the last one hundred years in 2015.56 The sonnets depict moments of intimacy between mother and son as they peel potatoes or pray ‘Elbow to elbow’ in the ‘packed church’ during ‘the Easter holidays’.57 In one especially moving reflection, Heaney recalls: Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek. She’d manage something hampered and askew Every time, as if she might betray The hampered and inadequate by too Well-adjusted a vocabulary.58

The phrase at the centre of this sonnet—‘So I governed my tongue’—is a paraphrasing of the title of Heaney’s critical volume published one year after The Haw Lantern, where Bishop exemplifies the central principle. This phrase in ‘Clearances’ draws attention not just to the growing synergy between Heaney’s prose and poetry; it highlights the sense in which sonnet 4 actively embodies the qualities Heaney deems praiseworthy in

54  She adds, ‘brilliant though they were, I actually fell asleep in Heaney’s lectures.’ Rosalie O’Brien Kivlehan, ‘Harvard, Seamus Heaney and me’, The Irish Times, March 27, 2015, web. 55  SS, p. 104. 56  See Dan Griffin, ‘When All The Others Were Away at Mass tops favourite poem poll’, The Irish Times, March 11, 2015, web. 57  HL, p.30. 58  HL, p.28.

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Bishop: the ‘mannerly’, ‘conciliatory’, ‘reticent’ nature, and the ‘respect for other people’s shyness in the face of poetry’s presumption’.59 Form is key to achieving this mannerly reticence in ‘Clearances’, much as Heaney understands it is for Bishop. In sonnet 5, the form’s allotted fourteen lines become a grid in which the folding of ‘sheets just off the line’ brings mother and son briefly ‘hand to hand’, a poignant image that is recreated on the page ‘In moves where I was x and she was o’.60 In the ‘bright nowhere’ of the sequence’s final poem, Heaney writes that his mother’s death has opened ‘a space / Utterly empty, utterly a source’,61 crystallising the sonnet’s role not just as a room-like container for these intimate domestic moments but as a therapeutic space for their re-­ enactment. As Toíbín notes, Bishop lost ‘her father when she was eight months old and her mother when she was five’, as well as ‘the home where she was brought up in Nova Scotia, from where she was removed by her father’s family’.62 Heaney shows sensitivity to these facts of Bishop’s biography in his critical writing and praises her villanelle, ‘One Art’, for exemplifying ‘the resolving power of deliberately articulated sounds’,63 sounds that in his view cast an ameliorative spell over the poem’s multiple losses. Specific images from Bishop’s ‘Sestina’—where she processes her own parental loss in a closed form—are recalled by sonnet 3 of ‘Clearances’, where silences and potato peels fall ‘Like solder weeping off the soldering iron’ and water ‘splashes’ bring each to their ‘senses.’64 In much the same way that Heaney’s ‘weeping’ potato peels foreshadow the ‘High cries’ later in ‘Clearances’, in ‘Sestina’ the ‘tears’ of Bishop’s grandmother mingle with ‘the rain that beats on the roof of the house’ as she ‘sits in the kitchen’ around ‘the Little Marvel Stove’.65 Heaney, as Vendler has recently noted, discovers in ‘Clearances’ that ‘absence can be brighter than their presence’,66 a lesson they both inscribe to the orphaned child of

 ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.101.  HL, p.29. 61  HL, p.32. 62  Toíbín, On Elizabeth Bishop, p.120. 63  ‘Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop’, R, p.185. 64  HL, p.27. 65  EBP, p.121. 66  Quoted by Ireland, ‘A Poet’s Own Epitaphs’, Harvard Gazette, 8 November 8, 2013, web. 59 60

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‘Sestina’.67 In line with this interpretation of ‘Sestina’, ‘Clearances’ reverses any sense of the form as confining due to its inevitable foreclosure, concluding instead with an image of a ‘soul ramifying’ far ‘beyond’68 the silence of the poem’s last line.

ii It becomes clearer in Seeing Things and The Spirit Level that Bishop’s lesson for Heaney is one of liberation and an understanding of the poem’s boundaries as something that can be breached for dazzling effect. In Seeing Things Heaney develops this through key images or themes that have discernible relationships with individual Bishop poems, such as ‘Fosterling’, another sonnet which show signs of being influenced by a poem of Bishop’s. Reflecting on his first encounters with Bishop’s poetry with O’Driscoll, Heaney recalls he taught ‘The Map’, a poem which dates from 1935 and later appeared as the first poem in Bishop’s debut collection North & South (1946), in practical criticism classes at Queen’s University.69 Bishop’s poem is a dazzling portrait of a mind thinking—a theory very significant to her early on70—in which the mental processes of the poet are essentially ‘mapped’: Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weeded wedges[.]71

Like many of Bishop’s eksphratic poems, the spectacle of the mind formulating (or reformulating) the object becomes the main subject of the 67  Helen Vendler argues ‘the blank center stands for the definitive presence’ in ‘Sestina’. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980), p.98. 68  HL, p.34. 69  SS, p.279. 70  Bishop found this principle of ‘a mind thinking’ in Morris W. Croll’s essay ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’. Bishop applied Croll’s analysis to Hopkins’s sprung rhythm in an undergraduate essay and cited passages in defence of her own poetic stylings in a letter to a critical friend, ‘Gerald Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry’, Vassar Review 23, February 1934, pp. 5–7. Paulin notes that Croll’s essay ‘spoke to Bishop like a vocation’ and argues ‘what she admired in the baroque was the “ardour” and dramatic energy and immediacy of an idea as it was formulated and experienced.’ ‘The Poet’s Poet’, web. 71  EBP, p.5.

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poem. As Thomas Travisano notes, critics have tended to ‘incautiously regard’ the poem’s final statement (‘More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors’) as ‘the key to all Bishop’s writing’.72 The layering of minutiae, the posing of questions, and the merging of drawn details with actual topography create an uncertainty that seems to be elucidated by the poem’s syntactically taut and resolving final line. However, as Travisano argues, to treat an ‘ambiguous line from a tensely balanced poem as if it were a bold sign pointing down a straight road’73 would be an error. For Bishop in ‘The Map’, the poetic process rather than the finished poem is the objective; the interplay of language, thought, and memory create, as she puts it in ‘The Gentleman of Shallot’, the ‘sense of constant re-adjustment’74 on which the poet thrives. In ‘Fosterling’, Heaney sees that this manner of instability is the ‘marvel’ worth crediting. Like ‘The Map, Heaney’s ‘Fosterling’ is structured around the contact between speaker and object, this time a picture from school: The immanent hydraulics of a land Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone. My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.75

Dedicated to John Montague, Heaney is ‘reading’ the Irish topography in a way comparable to the speaker of Bishop’s poem, who ‘reads’ the Newfoundland and Labrador landscapes of her own early childhood. Like ‘The Map’, the landscape of ‘Fosterling’ is internalised, with Heaney’s remembrance of it leading to an epiphany in which the ‘Heaviness’ of the past is dispelled. The poet, now ‘nearly fifty’, is ‘dazzled’ by the realisation that poetry itself is worth celebrating. As Dillon Johnston argues, in ‘Fosterling’ Heaney ‘arises from his Antaeus-like adherence to the earth […] towards the full, lightening cosmos which his new poetry will inhabit.’76 Certainly, the word-plumbing (‘glar and glit’), foreknowledge 72  Thomas J.  Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p.40. 73  Ibid. 74  EBP, p.12. 75  ST, p.52. 76  Dillon Johnston, ‘Irish Influence and Confluence in Heaney’s Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: The Cambridge Companion, 2009), p.153.

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(‘I can’t remember not ever having known’),77 neologism (‘in-placeness’), and airiness (‘So long for air to brighten’) of ‘Fosterling’ all became signatures of Heaney’s later style in which earth is swapped for air. Travisano’s reading of ‘The Map’ thus applies equally to ‘Fosterling’: poetry is not obliged to point boldly ‘down a straight road’,78 one way or the other. For Heaney, this fact is ultimately to poetry’s ‘credit’. Heaney repeats this Bishopesque discovery of possibilities beyond the ordinary in several other poems from this era. In his essay ‘Counting to a Hundred’, Heaney groups ‘The Fish’ and ‘Sandpiper’ together, arguing the poems demonstrate how ‘obsessive attention to detail can come through into visionary understanding’.79 As ever, Heaney’s reading of the poems he admires suggests an area of reciprocity. In ‘The Fish’, Bishop subjects the caught animal to intense focus, magnifying its ‘gills’, ‘entrails’, and ‘eyes / which were far larger than mine’ until the ‘boat’, against which the fish hangs ‘like a grunting weight’,80 takes on the aura of the Pequod, becoming an experience of nature in which ‘[r]eality outran apprehension’.81 In his own reading, Heaney argues that Bishop recognises the fish ‘as a harbinger of what Hopkins calls “the glory of God”, of that dearest freshness that lives deep down in things, all that which the poem itself finally calls “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.”’82 Heaney performs a similar feat in his own poem ‘The Rain Stick’, where ‘Downpour, sluicerush, spillage and backwash / Come flowing through’ the object in ‘a music that you never would have known / To listen for.’83 Like the speaker of ‘The Fish’ or the bird of ‘Sandpiper’, in ‘The Rain Stick’ Heaney gains access to an otherworldly experience through enraptured focus on what can be seen or heard. A ‘student of Blake’,84 Heaney writes

77  This idea of the poet’s foreknowledge (which appears in several Heaney poems) echoes Frost’s statement that each poem arrives at ‘an end you foreknew only with some sort of emotion’. ‘Education by Poetry’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.111. 78  Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, p.40. 79  ‘Counting to a Hundred’, R, p.177. 80  P, p.43. 81  Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002), p.102. 82  ‘Counting to a Hundred’, R, p.174. 83  SL, p.3. 84  EBP, p.129.

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that Bishop’s sandpiper sees ‘a world in a grain of sand’;85 in ‘The Rain Stick’, Heaney is ‘like a rich man entering Heaven / Through the ear of a raindrop.’86 Ultimately, the rain stick’s ‘dimuendo’ running ‘through all its scales’ becomes an aural equivalent to the ‘rainbow’ of ‘The Fish’ or the kaleidoscope of ‘quartz’ in ‘Sandpiper’. Each of these poems demonstrate how, in his own terms, ‘an intense focus can amplify rather than narrow our sense of scope.’87 There are also instances when Heaney adapts Bishopesque devices or themes for political treatments. In ‘The Settle Bed’, the ‘intense focus’88 and shifting viewpoint of Bishop’s ‘The Monument’ is used to demonstrate how poeticised thinking might serve, to borrow his terms from ‘Crediting Poetry’, in ‘the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.’89 Because of its sombre meditation on endurance and mortality, Bonnie Costello argues ‘The Monument’ consciously engages with Eliot’s idea of order in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ by inserting itself in a poetic tradition that includes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.90 To this list one could reasonably add Frost’s ‘The Woodpile’, where he meditates on the possible use or meaning of the ‘sunken’ object, found ‘far from a useful fireplace’, warming ‘the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay.’91 Bishop’s wooden object is described in similar terms: Then on the topmost cube is set a sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood, long petals of board, pierced with odd holes, four-sided, stiff, ecclesiastical.92

 Heaney, quoting Hopkins, ‘Counting to a Hundred’, R, p.176  SL, p.3. 87  ‘Counting to a Hundred’, R, p.177. 88  Ibid. 89  CP, p.460. 90  Bonnie Costello, ‘Bishop and the Poetic Tradition’, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.79. 91  CPRF, p.101. 92  EBP, p.25. 85 86

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Far from Yeats’s ‘gold mosaic’93 or Coleridge’s ‘stately pleasure dome’,94 Bishop’s monument has been eroded by the ‘conditions of its existence’, under the prowling ‘sunlight’ and ‘wind from the sea’.95 As the poem progresses, Bishop’s speaker increasingly wonders at the meaning of the object. An aspiring visual artist herself who kept up with aesthetic debates in contemporary art magazines, Bishop is keenly aware of the sense in which the observer’s emotional reaction to a monument fuses with the thing being memorialised.96 Much as Eliot argues that ‘existing monuments’ are ‘modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them’,97 Bishop’s wooden monument is changed by the very poem in which it appears. In his own reading of ‘The Monument’, Heaney emphasises this self-reflexivity, noting that the monument seems to be ‘standing over something which it also stands for’98 and that, in its ability to ‘shelter’ an undeclared meaning ‘within’ itself, the monument ‘resembles the work of the poet who imagined it into being in the first place.’99 As the mental map-making of the speaker in ‘The Map’ replaces the illustration, in ‘The Monument’ the speaker’s observations become one with the wooden object. Concluding at the ‘beginning of a painting, / a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, and all of wood’,100 the ‘something’ for which this monument ‘stands’ appears to be, at the most basic level, the self-justifying impulse to make, or, indeed, to remake. This same capacity for remaking is turned to political purposes in ‘The Settle Bed’. The poem utilises a similar framework to ‘The Monument’ but includes a context of shared experience. Pace, rhythm, diction and tone all conspire to create a language that mimics as much as it describes  W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Webb (London: Penguin, 1991), p.128. 94  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fifth edition, edited by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton & Company, 2005), p.809. 95  EBP, p.26. 96  See Peggy Samuels, ‘Bishop and Visual Art’, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, p.169. 97  T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, fourth edition (London: Methuen & Co., 1934), p.50. 98  ‘Counting to a Hundred’, R, p.171. 99  Ibid., p.172. 100  EBP, p.27. 93

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the object at the centre of the poem. The ‘four-square’ settle bed—‘“an inheritance”’—stands for the ‘Sigh-life of Ulster’, with the speaker hearing in the ‘headboard’ the ‘Unpathetic och ochs and och hohs’ of an ‘unwilling, unbeaten’ people, both ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’.101 The kind of poeticised thinking exhibited by ‘The Monument’, then, may be useful in the effort to dishevel the binary thinking that has led to stalemate in the actual within the Northern Ireland context. In order to ‘conquer that weight’, Heaney instructs: Imagine a dower of settle beds tumbled from heaven Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people, Then learn from that harmless barrage that whatever is given Can always be reimagined, however four-square, Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time[.]102

Heaney’s point is essentially a broadening of Bishop’s in ‘The Monument’: as Bishop’s ‘weathered wood’ is defined increasingly by the ‘conditions of its existence’, the meaning of the settle bed—which ‘stands’ for our identity—is generated out of an interplay of external elements. The whimsical image of settle beds tumbling ‘from heaven / Like some nonsensical vengeance’ demonstrates that inheritance, however absurd and ‘planked / In the long ago’, can be ‘reimagined’. In the final tercet, Heaney suggests the ‘fog’ of ground level causes the ‘actual’ to appear to steal away ‘beneath’ the ‘lookout’ as he descends his post, an image that again implies that one’s relationship to the world may be a matter of perspective rather than an outcome of birth. As Heaney explains in ‘Frontiers of Writing’, Ulster citizens must come to some accommodation in order to live in a place ‘that does not exist’ but is in a perpetual state of ‘resolved crisis’.103 In concert with these critical theories, ‘The Settle Bed’ demonstrates how the instability and provisionality of meaning explored by a poem like ‘The Monument’ (which he reads in the prior essay) can be virtuous in the context of Northern Ireland, where one’s identity is defined in all too rigid and predictable terms.

 ST, p.30.  ST, p.31. 103  ‘Frontiers of Writing’, R, p.190. 101 102

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iii In light of more recent reassessments of Bishops’s work, we can also consider the important, perhaps problematic limitations of Heaney’s analysis and ask who has benefited from their association. While Bishop’s reputation was growing in the 1980s when Heaney began to lionize her achievement, his own stardom in the international poetry establishment at this time greatly outshone hers. By the time his dedicated essay was published in The Redress of Poetry, Heaney had secured a tenured position at Harvard, delivered a commissioned poem for the 350th anniversary of the University, given the T. S. Eliot Memorial lectures at the University of Kent and the Richmond Ellmann Memorial Lectures at Emory University, been elected the Foreign Honorary Member of American Academy of Arts and Letters, and been Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1989–1994. Indeed, as Fennell writes in his 1991 pamphlet, there was even a rumour ‘that he was to receive the Nobel Prize’–104 a rumour that came true in 1995. Recent challenges to the older view of Bishop—one to which Heaney contributed during his rise—offer us not only new ways of reading Bishop but a fresh perspective from which to approach Heaney’s own poetry during this phase, influenced as it was by an example he understood only in relatively narrow terms. Unsurprisingly, the publication of new material by Bishop in Edgar Allan Poe and The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments (2006) was met with mixed reviews. The most notable objection came from Vendler, who commented that ‘students eagerly wanting to buy “the new book by Elizabeth Bishop” should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known.’105 To other critics the huge quantities of letters, unpublished poems, and drafts that have surfaced since Bishop’s death reveal her reticence as not just an aesthetic principle—as Heaney and Vendler insist—but as a form of self-­ censorship, given the ‘sexual politics at midcentury’.106 For them, the previously unpublished material thus offers an exciting ‘new psychic grammar through imagery that extends into well-known canonical poems that we can now better understand’,107 and they also point to Bishop’s instruction  Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1., p.7.  Vendler, ‘The Art of Losing’, New Republic, Vol. 234 Issue 12, 3 April 2006, p.33. 106  ‘Introduction’, Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), p.3. 107  Ibid., p.4. 104 105

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in her will to her literary executors to publish her unseen work as they saw fit, giving them the ‘power to determine whether any of my unpublished manuscripts and papers shall be published.’108 The image of Bishop constructed partly by Heaney’s still-quoted criticism is thus one that she herself has been responsible for dismantling. Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’ is especially interesting in this regard, and Heaney would build on his own analysis of that poem in ‘The Government of the Tongue’ to arrive at his famous air walk in ‘The Gravel Walks’. In The School Bag (1997), the anthology Heaney co-edited with Ted Hughes, published just one year after The Spirit Level, ‘At the Fishhouses’ is the sole poem collected to represent Bishop’s achievement. In Heaney’s reading of Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’ in ‘Counting to a Hundred’, it is clear he feels her poetry exemplifies some of his chief aesthetic principles and sees in her, as Elmer Kennedy-Andrews has suggested, ‘the kind of poet he himself wants to be.’109 But, following the death of Bishop’s lover and literary executor Alice Methfessel in 2009, there emerged previously unseen correspondences from 1947 between Bishop and her psychiatrist Ruth Foster. Their careful preservation in a locked box has led Heather Treseler to speculate that it was Bishop herself who saved them, wishing ‘her oeuvre to be understood by a future generation alongside the secrets that, in her lifetime, she kept so carefully from view.’110 These letters shed new light on ‘At the Fishhouses’, and they help us see the extent to which, in his reading of that poem, Heaney impresses his own principles upon Bishop. Zachariah Pickard takes issue with Heaney’s reading of the poem as progressing in a ‘one-way motion’111 toward its dramatic leap into a new form of knowledge. Where Pickard argues that, ‘[t]o know, for Bishop, is to suffer’112 and Lloyd Schwartz likewise sees “At the Fishhouses” as ‘thoroughly immersed in the complexity of human suffering’,113 no such 108  Lloyd Schwartz quotes this in his essay ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s “Finished” Unpublished Poems’, p.54. See Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century, pp.54–65. 109  Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.98. 110  Heather Treseler, ‘One Long Poem’, Boston Review, 17 August, 2016. Web. 111  Zachariah Pickard, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), p.91. 112  Ibid., p.74. 113  Lloyd Schwartz, ‘Back to Boston: Geography III and Other Late Poems’, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, p.144.

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consideration of suffering informs Heaney’s reading. On the contrary, Heaney sees the poem modelling a form of artistic liberation—one he seeks to replicate. In ‘At the Fishhouses’, Heaney beholds the most ‘mannerly of poets being compelled by the undeniable impetus of her art to break with her usual inclination to conciliate the social audience.’114 Reading up to this ‘break’, he sees the opening section as offering ‘fastidious notations which log the progress of the physical world’:115 Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible[.]116

As Pickard suggests, however, these lines do much more than merely describe. Where Heaney sees a desire to merge opposites in a kind of middle state only in the poem’s concluding lines, for instance, we can see that desire from the start. And where he finds a description focused on ‘the physical world’, Bishop makes it clear that we are in a symbolic world, through her conjuring of an indeterminate sensory experience. In the ‘gloaming almost invisible’ we are at the limits of perception, a condition underscored by the ‘silver’ and ‘apparent translucence’117 of the seascape, where elements not only meet but mix. The image of ‘wheelbarrows’ being ‘pushed up and down’,118 setting oppositions side by side, suggests that even at this early stage Bishop is thinking beyond binary terms, and seeking a kind of amphibiousness. Heaney’s seeing the poem’s first section as mainly description, and thus as a foil to the concluding lines, seems to reflect less an open encounter with the poem than a process of seeking confirmation of his thinking in ‘Counting to a Hundred’. There, quoting Charles Simic, Heaney describes ‘three kinds of images’: the first is ‘seen with eyes open in the manner of the realists’; the second is seen ‘with eyes closed’ by ‘everyday dreamers’; and the third partakes ‘of both dream and reality, and of something else [..] the mingling of the two.’119 Heaney’s divination of a three-part structure recalls his earlier suggestion, in ‘The  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.101.  Ibid., p.102. 116  EBP, p.62. 117  EBP, p.62. 118  EBP, p.62. 119  ‘Counting to a Hundred’, R, p.181. 114 115

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Government of the Tongue’, that in the final section of ‘At the Fishhouses’ Bishop achieves ‘a dream truth as well as a daylight truth.’120 And that tri-­ partition also describes exactly the structure of ‘The Gravel Walks’. In that poem and in ‘The Government of the Tongue’, Heaney makes much of the opening lines of Bishop’s final section, where the triadic phrase ‘cold dark deep’121 manifests both the ‘dream’ and ‘real’ elements of Bishop’s vision, its hypnotic repetition working together with the monosyllabic emphasis on physical sensations. Offsetting this physicality too is the ethereal ‘music’122 and the feelings it rouses in the speaker, just as the seal is roused from the depths of the sea. The scene also turns whimsical, the curious seal returning to the surface ‘against his better judgement’, and Heaney seizes on this line in reading the episode as the ‘spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big leap’; finally it is ‘also against the better judgement of the poet’, to stay on ‘the world of the surface’123 as well, as she follows the seal into swirls of the unconscious. In ‘The Gravel Walks’, Heaney takes up this phrase again, as he instructs himself to ‘walk on air against your better judgement’,124 a phrase that has ‘taken on a life of its own’125 in the work of Heaney and Paul Muldoon, Rachel Buxton notes, and that became Heaney’s epitaph. For Heaney, the phrase in the context of ‘At the Fishhouses’ refers to poetic liberation, since after it the poem in his view achieves an uplift like the one he stages in ‘The Gravel Walks’, with Bishop climbing rungs of her own invention ‘above the stones, / icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world.’126 Indeed, this sounds less like a ‘leap’,127 as Heaney had called it, than a ‘walk on air’.128 The panorama accelerates us toward the poem’s conclusion, where Bishop sees the water as ‘like what we imagine knowledge to be’, both ‘flowing, and flown.’129 Heaney reads these final lines as  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.106.  EBP, p.63. 122  EBP, p.63. 123  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.105. 124  CP, p.424. 125  See Buxton Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.100–02. 126  EBP, p.63. 127  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.105. 128  SL, p.49. 129  EBP, p.64 120 121

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the synthesis of practical and poetic forms of knowledge to exemplify the thesis of The Redress of Poetry neatly, a critical collection which, much like The Spirit Level, believes into existence a state of harmony between reality and imagination. Where Pickard and Schwartz see in Bishop’s final lines a painful acquiescence to reality, for Heaney the water, drawn from ‘the cold hard mouth / of the world’, appears to recall the brook water in Frost’s ‘Directive’, a poem he reads in the introduction of The Redress of Poetry. There, he describes poetic wisdom, like water, as offering a ‘clarification, a fleeting glimpse of a potential order of things “beyond confusion”, a glimpse that has to be its own reward.’130 For Heaney, then, as Bishop contemplates the ‘dark, salt, clear’ water, the recurrences of sounds marking her ‘leap’131 return her to what in another context Heaney calls the ‘original springs of our human being.’132 The limitations of Heaney’s reading here are underscored by accounts of the poem in Bishop’s letters to Foster. In them, Bishop explains that on the day she was inspired to write ‘At the Fishhouses’, she was at Lockeport, and thus, as Treseler notes, the poem’s seascape is ‘seen, not just conceived.’ Treseler adds: Bishop recounts awaking hungover, then taking a long bicycle ride ‘by way of punishment’ to the ocean shore where she sat on the rocks, ‘cried for a while’, and visited with an Atlantic seal. That episode, she says, reanimated an earlier dream about a ‘wild & dark’ storm in which she witnessed herself, ‘baby size’, feeding at Foster’s breast, a posture that she wryly rationalizes must be ‘a common dream about a woman analyst.’ Bishop confides in Foster that this mammary imagery informs ‘At the Fishhouses’, in which the narrator describes knowledge as ‘drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from the rocky breasts / forever.’133

Where Heaney sees ‘At the Fishhouses’ set in an imagined allegorical world where the artist makes difficult negotiations, the letters suggest that it has one foot firmly in reality and another in a dream that is itself symbolic of the real relationship between Bishop and Foster. Much more than was originally thought, Bishop’s poetry was shaped by her life and

 Introduction, R, p.xv.  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.105. 132  ‘Above the Brim: On Robert Frost.’, Salmagundi, No. 88/89 (1991), p.282. 133  Treseler, ‘One Long Poem’, web. 130 131

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personal relationships. Far from displaying the ‘self-denying’134 habit of governing the tongue, as Heaney puts it, ‘At the Fishhouses’ is rich in what Philip McGowan terms ‘the currency of memories within the unconscious self’.135 Heaney’s reading of the poem, then, highlights the extent to which he may be taking inspiration from a Bishop of his own making in ‘The Government of the Tongue.’ In ‘The Gravel Walks’, Heaney draws on ‘At the Fishhouses’ for the form that elsewhere serves as the model for his political verse. As Pickard points out, Heaney’s reading ‘does paint the poem as something of an anomaly for her’, and ‘The Gravel Walks’ similarly aims to subvert expectations, especially in its preference for earth over air, writing back to ‘Fosterling’ where Heaney determines to leave the ‘doldrums’136 behind. In his Nobel lecture a year before the publication of The Spirit Level, the phrase appears again, as he permits himself the ‘luxury of walking on air’,137 in contrast, he explains, to his earlier ambitions for a poetry of concrete reality’138 and his ‘temperamental disposition toward an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are’.139 Similarly, ‘At the Fishhouses’ in his view presents the spectacle of the ‘most mannerly of poets being […] tempted to dare a big leap’.140 If, in ‘The Gravel Walks’, Heaney’s ‘leap’141 appears spontaneous, it nonetheless mirrors the example he deconstructs in his criticism years earlier. Like ‘At the Fishhouses’, in ‘The Gravel Walks’ Heaney combines elements of earth and air, though he does so much more selfconsciously than Bishop. As in his reading of the opening lines of ‘At the Fishhouses’, Heaney begins by ‘layering’ observations and taking readings from ‘different levels and from different angles’ until ‘a world is brought into being’:142 As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.143  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.101.  Philip McGowan, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Work of Fire’, Mosaic: an Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 53, No. 1, March 2020, p.4. 136  EBP, p.5. 137  CP, p.449. 138  CP, p.450. 139  CP, p.451. 140  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.105. 141  Ibid. 142  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.105. 143  SL, p.48. 134 135

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Heaney’s thick-textured early aesthetic is recalled here by his choice to offset the ‘smooth’ river with fricative ‘flints’ and ‘sandstone-bits’. However, there are signs in the fourth stanza that this earthy pastoral may soon give way to Bishop-like ‘dream’144 truth when ‘cement mixers’ begin to ‘come to life’. Indeed, the first section’s concluding image of ‘Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned’, effectively destabilizes the poem’s physical world and sets the stage for the later air-walk. Bishop’s entrancing phrase ‘cold dark deep’ would not seem out of place in the second section of Heaney’s ‘The Gravel Walks’, which speaks portentously of the ‘Milt of the earth’,145 and her final, rising panorama above the ‘rounded gray and blue-gray stones’146 seems to hover behind Heaney’s sixth stanza, where dream and reality address one another as ‘clear water’ runs among ‘Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.’147 In the poem’s final lines, the ‘actual washed stuff’ has been worked into an ‘absolution’. Much like Bishop’s speaker when she sings to the seal, then, Heaney establishes himself ‘somewhere in between’ the ‘solid’ and the ‘tune’,148 the real and the imaginary. Drawing the title of his review of The Spirit Level from the line preceding those quoted above, Nicholas Jenkins discusses that title phrase, ‘Walking on Air’, as ‘an organizing preoccupation for Heaney.’149 Jenkins suggests that the instruction to ‘walk on air against your better judgement’, aside from advocating a kind of joy, also ‘conveys an effort of determination and defiance’ and is as much a ‘remaking as relaxing.’150 Like what Heaney sees as Bishop’s ‘big leap’,151 then, ‘The Gravel Walks’ offers an apologia for the ungoverned tongue and its associations of poetic authority. As Jenkins argues, it represents a dissolution of parameters, yielding the new perspective from which Heaney will consider the binary identities and political deadlock of Northern Ireland. Heaney does this in ‘Two Lorries’, a poem which is modelled directly on Bishop’s ‘Sestina’ and from which he takes another significant formal  Ibid., p.106.  SL, p.48. 146  EBP, p.63. 147  SL, p.49. 148  SL, p.49. 149  Nicholas Jenkins, ‘Walking on Air’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 July 1996, pp.10–12 and collected in The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Elmer Andrews (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998), p.166. 150  Ibid. 151  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.105. 144 145

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lesson in part at the expense of its nuances. Rejecting the suggestion that he found the sestina form ‘restrictive,’ Heaney remarked that, ‘[o]n the contrary, it got me on the move’,152 a view of the intricate form as liberating, influenced, he somewhat surprisingly explains, by Bishop’s ‘Sestina’, which, as we have seen already, appears to have been important to him as he composed the earlier ‘Clearances’ sequence. ‘Two Lorries’ is also about Heaney’s loss of his mother, yet in ‘Two Lorries’ Heaney applies Bishop’s lessons to the political situation in Northern Ireland, implying an increased ambition and freedom in this later era. Indeed, while writing ‘Two Lorries’, Heaney remembers ‘whipping [‘Sestina’] down off the shelf and going for it head-on, letting the repeated end-words take me wherever they wanted.’153 He also gives attention to ‘Sestina’ in ‘Counting to a Hundred’ and, as with ‘At the Fishhouses’, there we see how his reading of the poem is shaped by the instruction he needs from it. Where Richard Flynn sees ‘Sestina’ as a ‘bleak poem that refuses consoling wisdom’154 and Jacqueline Vaught Brogan sees its form as ‘prison-­ like’,155 Susan McCabe finds that the ‘proud form’ of ‘Sestina’ ‘testifies to the flexibility and adaptability of the imagination that can create new possibilities with limited materials’,156 and Heaney’s analysis accords with McCabe’s, seeing the ‘pain’ as reflexively ‘shut up’ by the sestina’s formal restrictiveness, paralleled in the poem by the child’s drawing of an ‘inscrutable house.’ Bishop’s formal ‘virtuosity’ works to ‘mesmerise’ her sorrows as she ‘circles them’, he adds, so that the sestina form assuages the remembered pain by making it ‘obedient to creative will’.157 For Heaney, the recurrences of ‘child’, ‘grandmother’, and ‘house’158 draw attention to what, like Vendler,159 he sees as the source of the child’s sadness, the absence of the child’s parents. But where, as Brogan elaborates, ‘Sestina’ also offers a critique of confining gender roles through the grandmother’s  SS, p.361.  SS, p.362. 154  Richard Flynn, ‘Words in Air: Bishop, Lowell, and the Aesthetics of Autobiographical Poetry’, Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century, p.217. 155  Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, ‘“An Almost Illegible Scrawl”: Elizabeth Bishop and Textual (Re)formations’, Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century, p.242. 156  Susan McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p.231. p.210. 157  ‘Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop’, R, p.170. 158  EBCP, p.121. 159  Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets, p.98. 152 153

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obedience to ‘the stove’ and the ‘genuinely controlling script’160 of the almanac, reflected by the deterministic framework of the sestina form itself, Heaney’s reading reveals the same partial blindness to gender roles that his construction of Bishop, and Plath, more widely represents. For Brogan, the title of ‘Sestina’ parallels the rigidity of its form with the ‘mindless adherence to cultural conventions’ of daily life. ‘Bishop isn’t subverting the form as such’, she argues, but rather, ‘the form comes to embody the very situation as realized in actual life that she is critiquing— i.e., that of being “con-scripted.”’161 Heaney sees the form operating in a very different way in that poem. In his broad study of poetic form, John Lennard finds ‘Sestina’ to be ‘exemplary in its cycle of repetitions’ and yet ‘distinct in choosing iambic tetrameter.’ The more usual pentameter ‘not only grants an extra 39 feet’, he notes, ‘but increases the distance between every end-word, and every repetition of an end-word—a wide slalom by comparison with [Bishop’s] narrowness of measure.’162 Bishop’s anapestic variances, Lennard also suggests, ‘infringe only against metre’, while the ‘successfully regular lines in the first and last sestets’ foreclose the impression ‘of any achieved escape.’163 Similarly, Brogan describes Bishop’s sestina as ‘petrified.’164 Drawing on Teodolinda Barolini’s study of Dante, she likens Bishop’s use of the form to Dante’s attempt to make the sestina ‘as petrified verbally as the petra it describes’, in contrast to Petrarch’s ‘aim[ing] for greater fluidity’, and his ‘seeking ways to reduce the form’s resistance.’165 In this light, it is revealing that in ‘The Government of the Tongue’ Heaney precedes his long reading of Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’ with a look at Dante’s formalism. There, rather than adopting the traditional view of Dante as ‘a poet whose tongue is governed by an orthodoxy or system’, Heaney turns to Ossip Mandelstam’s recanonisation of Dante as

160  Brogan, ‘“An Almost Illegible Scrawl”: Elizabeth Bishop and Textual (Re)formations’, p.251. 161  Ibid., p.250. 162  John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.70. 163  Ibid., p.71. 164  Brogan, ‘“An Almost Illegible Scrawl”: Elizabeth Bishop and Textual (Re)formations’, p.250. 165  Brogan refers to Teodolinda Barolini and quotes from Dante and the Origins of Italian Culture in her notes, p.254.

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‘the sponsor of impulse and instinct’166 whose ‘three-edged stanza is formed from within, like a crystal, not cut on the outside like a stone’, and whose ‘poem is not governed by external conventions and impositions but follows the laws of its own need.’167 This view leads Heaney to understand the sestina as a site not of constraint but of liberation, the sense of freedom arising not from attempts to reduce the form’s resistance but from successfully mastering it. Heaney’s deep sense that formal poetry can function to ameliorate—can work, as for Frost, as a ‘stay against confusion’—168 thus prompts him to understand Bishop’s formal virtuosity not as a sign of acquiescence but as a victory over tribulation. To be an exemplar at all for Heaney, Bishop must be redefined as a survivor. In ‘Two Lorries’, the repetitions of the sestina form work to interweave private and public loss, and as with ‘Sestina’, ‘narrative, thematic and emotional meaning’, as Neil Corcoran puts it, emerges as ‘coincident with formal means.’169 ‘Even if one is alert to what was once called the fallacy of imitative form’, Corcoran adds, ‘a successful sestina makes a strong case for its viability and validity.’ ‘Two Lorries’ is a significant moment in the development of Heaney’s public poetry because it builds on the freedom and confidence won in ‘The Gravel Walks’ to create a parallel between its own formal operations and the political violence of Northern Ireland, using the sestina to embody both the intractable reality and, in its mastery of the form’s rigidity, a transcending of that reality, too. McCabe reads ‘Sestina’ as a survivalist text, in which the ‘imagination’, despite ‘limitation’ and ‘facing the apparent finality of loss’, ultimately ‘empowers us with the potential for remaking’,170 but today such a reading seems more appropriate to ‘Two Lorries’ than to ‘Sestina’. By discovering a range of possibility in the end-words and following them to their full conclusions, Heaney in ‘Two Lorries’ achieves a high degree of fluidity. In the parallel domestic setting of ‘Two Lorries’, Heaney’s ‘nineteen-­ forties mother’ is kept around ‘her stove’ by the repeated ‘ashes’ that she, in the third stanza, wipes with ‘a backhand from her cheek’.171 Though  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.95.  Ibid., p.94. 168  Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.132. 169  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, p.198. 170  McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, p.211. 171  SL, p.17. 166 167

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‘ashes’ is an end-word, it does not constrain Heaney but instead opens up to three images: the ashes of the mother’s stove, the ashes of the coalman’s lorry, and the ashes left by the explosion ‘in a time beyond her time in Magherafelt’, where she appears, ghostlike among the rubble of the bombing. Though it is also an end-word, ‘lorry’ too works not to imprison but to mobilise. For the mother, the ‘lorry’, affords at least an imagined mobility, in her flirtations with the coal man and in her escape from the ‘business round her stove’ in hypothetical dates ‘to a film in Magherafelt’, and it also works as a temporal lever that ‘fastforwards’ the poet to the later bombing. Transformative, too, is the end-word ‘load’, which, as Corcoran notes, appears ‘in homonym, rhyme and off-rhyme’ as ‘lode’, ‘lead’, ‘payload’, and ‘explode’,172 recurrences that help the poet to situate his mother at the site of the bombing, bringing together not only ‘dream’ and ‘daylight’173 truth but, significantly, personal and communal experience: A revenant on the bench where I would meet her In that cold-floored waiting room in Magherafelt, Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes. Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman[.]174

Beginning with ‘Listen’, the envoi tries to harness what in Bishop’s villanelle ‘One Art’ Heaney calls the ‘resolving power of deliberately articulated sound.’175 In reordering the repeated end-words, Heaney can interpenetrate two forms of loss, bringing to his personal grief a wider context of significance, and to the public atrocity the tenderness of private mourning. Indeed, ‘Two Lorries’ seems designed to exemplify what Heaney articulated a year earlier in ‘Crediting Poetry’, that verse should ‘touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed’—176 the iron frame of the sestina structure functioning to keep the latter sufficiently at bay. In this way, ‘Two Lorries’ represents the culmination of Bishop’s influence on Heaney. As for Bishop’s travellers, for  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, p.198.  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.106. 174  SL, p.18. 175  ‘Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop’, R, p.185. 176  CP, p.467. 172 173

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him home is a fluid construct, absence becoming presence through the interweaving of memory, imagination, and history. And this model serves as Heaney’s new and less problematic way of addressing ‘communal experience’; no longer taking the adjudicating stance’177 as he did in an earlier phase, he simply offers the border-crossing poetic structure itself as redirection in a verse admired for its ‘ethical depth and lyrical beauty.’178 There is a sense of Heaney as an escape artist in ‘Two Lorries’, performing feats of poetic virtuosity to overcome the form’s sense of inevitable foreclosure. That he takes this lesson from ‘Sestina’, a poem that arguably remains trapped in a pain he does not recognise, highlights the degree to which Bishop’s influence on Heaney became an energy of its own, charged as much by Heaney’s needs as by the real example of her work. Today, Heaney is remembered at Harvard for his ‘modesty, hard work, and the prosaic tools he used to craft his timeless words’—179 terms that strongly echo the traditional view of Bishop as a mannerly poet of reticence and restraint. The contrast, however, between Harvard’s celebration of Heaney and its earlier treatment of Bishop is stark: while Heaney was accommodated in the final stages of his career and is still mourned, Bishop’s request for an extension on the mandatory retirement age of 66 was denied, resulting in a bitter and ‘unceremonious’180 exit without readings or gatherings. Bishop, it appears, did not benefit from the reputation of modesty and quiet reticence in the way Heaney later would. And through a quotation and divine inspiration, she hovers behind Heaney’s epitaph, an apt summation of Bishop’s influence, extraordinarily intense, even if in one sense a fiction of Heaney’s own making. In many ways, then, the final image from ‘A Hank of Wool’ sums up the correspondence between Heaney and Bishop’s work during the period spanning The Haw Lantern to The Spirit Level. In the tribute poem, Heaney tells Bishop he desires ‘to see your island I have never seen’ and ends ‘facing there with both arms open’;181 though Heaney shows much openness to Bishop’s achievement in his critical writing and poems, there is a sense in which she  Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, p.17.  Nobel Press Release, 1995. 179  Ireland, ‘A Poet’s Own Epitaphs’, web. 180  Brett C.  Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory of It (California: University of California Press, 1993), p.530. 181  Listed as folder 5.1 Heaney, Seamus, 1979 (1 letter, 1 postcard)’ in the Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives & Special Collections Library, Vassar College. 177 178

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is ‘never seen’ by him fully in either. Heaney’s winning of the Nobel prize at a time when Bishop was central to his verse and the continued citation of his commentary by today’s scholars of Bishop (even as elements of his analysis appear outmoded) highlights the extent to which each poet has altered the legacy of the other, albeit invisibly and perhaps even problematically. That this association persists despite what now appears as his limited reading of elements of her work, only adds to the complexity and allurement of the relationship. Ultimately, his poetry in this phase is deeply indebted to a model of reticence to a large extent of his own devise.

CHAPTER 6

American Poetry and Heaney’s Final Works

In his 1995 Nobel Award acceptance speech, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Heaney reflects on the first thirty years of his career and the evolution of his poetics. He says, to ‘begin with’, he desired ‘truth to life’ in a poetry that embodied ‘concrete reality’, explaining that he ‘rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct’ and provided ‘an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.’1 Over time, he explains, he wanted a verse that could accommodate this ‘direct’ style while pushing in the opposite direction, towards the ‘marvellous’.2 Heaney’s choice to publish ‘Crediting Poetry’ at the end of Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (1998) gives these remarks a sense of resolution, as if drawing one era to a close in anticipation of another. It is possible to trace a certain stylistic retuning back to poems like ‘Fosterling’, where he allows himself to be ‘dazzled’ and ‘credit marvels’,3 but Heaney fully realises his desire for a lighter verse in his last three volumes, Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010). The elements now considered to be key features of Heaney’s late style run through each of the last three books despite their varying themes: peace in Northern Ireland, 9/11, and Heaney’s failing health after a stroke in  CP, p.450.  CP, p.458. 3  ‘Fosterling’, ST, p.52. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7_6

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2006. Though they received much praise upon release, these ‘final three books’ have been given ‘comparatively little attention’4 in critical commentary compared to Heaney’s early and middle poetry, as Eugene O’Brien has recently noted. Closer examination of these three volumes would benefit Heaney studies broadly, but these collections are particularly significant for a study concerned with Heaney and America, for these books show him returning to his American influences as he reconceptualised the relationship between poetic form and the external world. The three American writers with whom Heaney aligns himself in this last phase are Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. In contrast to the intense periods of influence that characterise his early and midcareer, in Heaney’s final collections these three American poets are absorbed into a wider ensemble that includes, amongst others, Virgil and Czesław Miłosz. In a review of Electric Light, John Wilson Foster noted that Heaney’s voice had become ‘a chorus of other voices’, one that was ‘increasingly confident and appropriative’5 in its use of other writers. This analysis is echoed by the contributors to O’Brien’s volume of critical essays on Heaney’s late poetry. O’Brien argues in his introduction that Heaney’s use of ‘literary reference in the later books’ is a means of seeking ‘literary avatars against whom he can bounce his own ideas and with whom he can enter into a form of aesthetic and ethical dialogue.’6 This is quite literally the case in Electric Light when Heaney speaks to Virgil in one of the volume’s three eclogues. Throughout the book, there are signs that Heaney has taken inspiration from Frost’s adaption of Virgil, highlighting a significant and overlooked connection to Heaney’s ‘favorite poet.’7 To return to the terms of ‘Crediting Poetry’, in Frost Heaney had an example of a modern poet who embraced the ‘marvellous’8 literariness of the Eclogues without abandoning ‘concrete reality’.9

4  Eugene O’Brien, ‘Introduction’, “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), p.2. 5  John Wilson Foster, ‘Electric Light by Seamus Heaney’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 27/28, Vol. 27, No. 2–Vol. 28, No. 1 (Fall, 2001–Spring, 2002), p.119. 6  O’Brien, ‘Introduction’, “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances”, p.21. 7  Helen Vendler, ‘Second Thoughts & Coda: Tell the truth. Do not be afraid.’ Irish Pages Vol. 8, No. 2, 2014. Heaney, p.15. 8  CP, p.458. 9  CP, p.450.

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Heaney’s adaption of the eclogue form for Electric Light, and his tactic of allowing the form’s dialogic nature to influence the volume’s other poems, recalls Frost’s method. Frost, who used the eclogue explicitly for ‘Build Soil: A Political Pastoral’, had earlier adapted the form for the dialogue poems in North of Boston (1914). Frost’s relatively recent eclogue versions demonstrate the form’s transferability to a modern context; the note of subversion inherent in using realistic contemporary speech in the classical form may also have appealed to Heaney. Moreover, Frost’s eclogues exhibit the form’s capacity for sustaining the multiple and sometimes conflicting viewpoints of the poet, allowing Heaney to explore the complex critical arguments of his prose writings in a two-sided verse. The mutual appreciation for Virgil also highlights a shared literary erudition that complicates the traditional picture of the Frost-Heaney relationship, as commentary has tended to focus on Heaney’s early farming poetry where his debts to Frost are most overt. When each poets’ use of Virgil is compared directly, it becomes clear that Virgil appeals to Frost and Heaney for several corresponding reasons, adding new layers of complexity to Heaney’s most significant American relationship.

ii Due to the volume’s use of the eclogues, critical attention on Heaney’s use of classical material increased significantly after the publication of Electric Light. Wes Davis and Rachel Buxton have noted the triangular dynamic between Heaney, Frost, and Virgil. Davis argues that, in Heaney’s later era, ‘it is not Frost’s documentary impulse’ Heaney is drawn to but ‘his lyrical transfiguring of fact’, noting that ‘Frost’s poems’ mix ‘the facts of a life of rural labor’ with ‘the dream that a poet like Virgil cultivates above and around those facts’.10 Today, we have increased knowledge of Heaney’s engagement with Virgil due to the posthumous Aeneid (2016). It is also worth remembering that Heaney had already translated a section of Virgil’s Aeneid in ‘The Golden Bough’, from Seeing Things (1991), where he depicts a tree that gives access to ‘earth’s hidden places’ if plucked by one ‘called’ by ‘fate’.11 The section’s personal resonance with Heaney at this time, who lost both his parents in the 1980s, is clear. Virgil 10  Wes Davis, ‘From Mossbawn to Meliboeus: Seamus Heaney’s Ambivalent Pastoralism’, Southwest Review, Vol. 92, No. 1 (2007), p.105. 11  ST, p.5.

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is also mentioned by name in ‘An Afterwards’ and ‘The Flight Path’, while references and allusions to classical texts in Heaney’s critical writings are well noted. Indeed, both The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney and The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost feature essays on classical influence, indicating an important shared strand. Writing in The Guardian in 2001, Heaney explains that Electric Light borrows ‘the imagined weather of Virgil’s Eclogues’, adding that the volume ‘could even carry a Virgilian epigraph’.12 He concludes the piece with Aeneas’s line from Book I of Aeneid, ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent’, meaning ‘There are tears of things and mortal things touch the mind.’ In a key reading of Frost’s ‘Directive’ from his critical volume The Redress of Poetry (1995), Heaney argues that Virgil’s ‘lacimae rerum, the tears of things’ are absorbed and re-experienced ‘in the words’13 of Frost’s poem, indicating the degree to which Heaney feels Frost’s modern achievement typifies Virgilian principles. Much of Heaney’s praise for Virgil is rooted in his sense that the eclogue form represents a basic paradigm for how poetry relates to the actual. Donna L. Potts notes that the ‘source of pastoral poetry can be traced to the boukolika (“ox-herding poems”) of the mid-third-century BC poet Theocritus of Syracuse’.14 Virgil, who Pott’s characterises as ‘Theocritus’s great successor’, also ‘adopted the term bukolika and is generally considered more influential than Theocritus on the western tradition of pastoral poetry.’15 Virgil’s eclogues incorporated more contemporary events than his predecessor, responding to issues such as volatile Roman politics, land disputes, and civil war. Potts argues that, after Virgil, bucolic poetry became known as ‘pastoral’ through an emphasis on some of the tradition’s most important elements, like ‘the relation between nature and human nature’, the ‘present and the mythicized past’, the ‘motif of transformation […] and a rural inhabitant, who served for later poets as a substitute for the herdsman of classical pastoral.’16 Heaney shows a keen awareness of these origins in his critical writings, and he explains in ‘Eclogues ‘“In Extremis’” that modern poets have no need to prove the viability of the pastoral form in the modern era because the form’s  Heaney, ‘Lux Perpetua’, The Guardian, 16 June, 2001, web.  ‘Introduction’, R, p.xv. 14  Donna L.  Potts, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), p.1. 15  Ibid., p.2. 16  Ibid. 12 13

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durability has already been proven by Virgil, who inherited it from Theocritus and extended its usage, as Potts describes.17 In this long perspective, then, Frost is not the dominating precursor he once was, but a poet who was, as Heaney writes of Michael Longley, simply ‘the latest practitioner’18 of the eclogue and an inheritor of a shared past. Heaney argued for the pastoral mode’s longevity much earlier in a review of The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse (1974). In his review (which he collected in Preoccupations (1980)), he insists that the term ‘pastoral’ itself has been ‘extended by usage’, rebuking the editors for staying ‘within the limits set by the dictionary’.19 Clearly an area of deep interest for him, Heaney insists ‘the value of the book’ is ‘lessened by’ the decision of the editors not to print the translations of Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, Mantuan, [and] Marot’. He contends English poets such as Milton were ‘as conscious of’ classical poetry as today’s students are ‘unconscious’20 of it, noting that the recent Irish writers Synge, Kavanagh, and Montague have all published works that are continuous with the pastoral tradition. When he returns to the subject in ‘“In Extremis’” nearly thirty years later, he lambasts the same editors once again, this time for their definition of the pastoral as a mere mystification of ‘the harshness of actual social and economic organization’.21 For Heaney, pastoral poetry maintains ‘the covenant with life’ despite its ‘literary nature’ and, as he too began to adapt Virgil for the poems of Electric Light, it is unsurprising that he would have looked to Frost, whose expertise in fusing the classical and the modern, the literary and the real matters of life, he knew intimately. Frost’s history of bridge-building to classical poets, and specifically to Virgil, is extensive. In his letters, Frost expressed fondness for Virgil’s works and wrote on one occasion that he ‘first heard the voice from a printed page in a Virgilian eclogue and from Hamlet’.22 Many critics were quick to highlight Frost’s debt to classical poetry, including Ezra Pound, whose influential review of North of Boston was titled ‘Modern Georgics’ after Virgil’s The Georgics, though Pound also refers to the poems as ‘New 17  Heaney, ‘Eclogues “In Extremis”: On the Staying Power of Pastoral’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature, Vol. 103C, No. 1 (2003), p.2. 18  Ibid. 19  Heaney, ‘In the Country of Convention: English Pastoral Verse’, P, p.173. 20  Ibid., p.175. 21  Heaney, ‘“In Extremis”’, p.3. 22  Sidney Cox, A Swinger of Birches: A Portrait of Robert Frost (New York: New  York University Press, 1957), p.109.

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England eclogues’23 within his review. Buxton notes that Frost’s use of Virgil is ‘generally well recognised’,24 with the caveat that the relationship between Frost and Virgil remains ‘so deep and pervasive that it is nearly impossible to describe’.25 John Talbot concurs there is a far greater ‘subtly in Frost’s engagement with Latin poetry than is usually proposed’, adding that Frost: liked to stress that his formal education had been primarily classical. During his stint at Harvard he preferred studying Latin and Greek to English, and before he wrote his first English verses, he wrote in Latin and Greek […] He asserted the superiority of his own classical training to that of his early champion Ezra Pound, whose overt classical references and frequent use of Greek and Latin phrases Frost regarded as specious[.]26

This picture of Frost’s thorough ‘classical training’ sits in tension with the simplified image of his achievement that persists among some audiences to this day, a simplification that, as Blake Morrison notes, has allowed him and Heaney both to reach an audience beyond the university.27 Talbot observes that Frost’s extensive familiarity with classical texts results in the kind of allusion that is much more subtle than the work of his contemporaries; Frost ‘identified himself with Virgil’28 and his ‘deepest affinities’ to Roman poets ‘are likely to be felt by those versed not only in the subject matter, but the tone, meters, and syntax’29 of the original Latin texts. Heaney was one such reader, having studied Latin and read Virgil from an unusually young age. Before taking Latin classes at St Columb’s College, Heaney recalls that he ‘enjoyed’ Latin in the ‘early morning lessons’ provided by ‘Master Murphy’ at Anahorish Primary School.30 When  Ezra Pound, ‘Modern Georgics’, Poetry, Vol. 5, No. 3 (December 1914), p.129.  Rachel Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.54. 25  Ibid. Buxton quotes Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p.153. 26  John Talbot, ‘Robert Frost’s Hendecasyllabics and Roman Rebuttals’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer, 2003), p.73. 27  Blake Morrison notes Heaney has benefitted from a comparable simplification of his achievement. Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London and New  York: Routledge, 1982), p.12. 28  Talbot, ‘Robert Frost’s Hendecasyllabics and Roman Rebuttals’, p.77. 29  Ibid., p.74. 30  SS, p.295. 23 24

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he began Latin lessons at secondary school, he ‘started at an advantage and never looked back’, finding the language ‘so workable and predictable, once you got the hang of the declensions and conjugations and genders’.31 At St Columb’s he was taught by Father Michael McGlinchey, ‘who loved the language and had a feel for the literary qualities of the texts—especially Virgil’, whose ‘Book Nine’ was taught, not ‘Book Six’,32 which McGlinchey preferred (and which Heaney would later translate). At Queen’s University, Heaney even used a Latin pen name to sign his first poems, ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘uncertain’. It is unsurprising, then, that by the time of David Ferry’s The Eclogues of Virgil: A Translation (1999), Heaney felt he had ‘enough Latin to be susceptible to the mesmerism of the hexameters.’33 In ‘“In Extremis”’, Heaney even responds to Virgil’s poems partly in the original Latin, demonstrating his ease in the language and his ability, like Frost, to go far beyond the ‘small change of easy classical allusion’34 in his use of Virgil. Heaney’s conception of the eclogue was undoubtedly affected by Frost, whose classical authority he frequently remarks upon in his prose. In his dedicated essay ‘Above the Brim’, Heaney repeatedly underscores the classical elements of Frost’s poetry. He sees classical influence on Frost’s ‘sound of sense’35 principle, which, according to Heaney, harnesses the ‘volatile’ and ‘most important part of poetry’, what ‘we can no longer hear in poems in ancient Greek or Latin’.36 In ‘Threshold and Floor’ (published one year before Electric Light), Heaney again stresses Frost’s classical qualifications, writing ‘[e]ven Frost, for all his insistence on his own accent, cleared his throat, as if to remind English poetry he had read his Virgil.’37 As discussion of Frost prompts Heaney to mention Virgil, consideration of Virgil equally directs him back to Frost, leading him in “‘In Extremis’” to describe Virgil’s Eclogues ‘as roads less travelled by where the country we thought we knew is seen again in a new and revealing light.’38 It is clear that Frost and Virgil are associated in Heaney’s critical  Ibid.  SS, p.296. 33  SS, p.389. 34  Talbot, ‘Robert Frost’s Hendecasyllabics and Roman Rebuttals’, p.74. 35  Robert Frost, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrence Thompson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p.80. 36  Heaney, ‘Above the Brim: On Robert Frost’, Salmagundi, No. 88/89 (1991), p.273. 37  Heaney, ‘Threshold and Floor’, Metre, Vol. 7, No. 8 (Spring-Summer 2000), p.265. 38  Heaney, “‘In Extremis’”, p.4. 31 32

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thinking and, thus, the modern American poet’s achievement may have represented a useful example of how to adapt Virgil’s forms for contemporary, realistic settings. Frost even earns a place on Heaney’s shelf in Electric Light’s ‘The Bookcase’, possibly implying his role in the book’s adaption of Virgilian material. The shared attraction to Virgil highlights many significant overlaps in the Roman, Irish, and American contexts. Leendert Weeda points out that Virgil was ‘born during the civil war, and experienced its horrors’.39 Weeda explains that cycles of ‘heavy taxes’ resulting from bursts of political conflict and the ‘expropriations of the land’ of ‘small farmers’ had ‘impoverished the population.’40 While Heaney’s readers may recognise parallels with Irish history in these details, the context would have resonated equally with Frost in post-Great Depression America. Weeda observes that ‘Ecl. 1 and Ecl. 9 contain elements of Vergil’s personal experience and portray contemporary social and political issues’;41 it is no coincidence that these most political eclogues are the two with which Frost and Heaney most engage. Frost’s ‘Build Soil’ is based on Virgil’s first eclogue and addresses Frost’s concerns with the industrialisation of agriculture in 1930s America and with the Democratic Party’s New Deal politics. Delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Columbia University in May 1932, ‘Build Soil’ borrows its farmer-speakers from Virgil’s first eclogue to address the struggling agricultural sector of the 1930s. In Virgil’s original ‘Eclogue I’, Tityrus speaks with Meliboeus, whose property has been struck by ‘lightening’ and whose goat has given birth in the road, losing twins ‘who would have been our hope, / Back on our farm.’42 Returned from ‘the big / City of Rome’43 where it was determined that he could keep his land, Tityrus tries to console the less fortunate Meliboeus, who, at the poem’s conclusion, is haunted by the thought of ‘some godless barbarous soldier’44 seizing his farm. When compared to Heaney’s closest eclogue version (titled simply ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’), Frost’s ‘Build Soil’ is a far freer use of the original source. And though 39  Leendert Weeda, Vergil’s Political Commentary: In the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid (Warsaw and Berlin: De Gruyter Open, 2015), p.3. 40  Ibid., p.1. 41  Ibid., p.58. 42  David Ferry, The Eclogues Virgil: A Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), p.16. 43  Ibid., p.17. 44  Ibid., p.19.

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both eclogues are concerned with land confiscation, the two poems unfold quite differently. Heaney’s ‘Eclogue IX’ is a meditative conversation about the efficacy of poetry while Frost’s becomes a much longer exchange in which Tityrus gives Meliboeus direct instructions to save his farm from ‘exploiting businesses’,45 reflecting the contemporary American context. As the dialogue progresses, however, the poem becomes more self-reflexive and ironic, providing major points of comparison with Heaney’s ‘Glanmore Eclogue’ and ‘Eclogue IX’. In ‘Build Soil’, the highly literary eclogue framework affords Frost many additional levels of meaning; far from offering a straightforward critique of the Democratic Party’s proposed Keynesian economics, Frost refuses to settle on a stable position. In the opening lines of ‘Build Soil’, we meet a similarly defeated (if contemporised) Meliboeus who tells Tityrus he has had to sell his ‘interval farm’ for a ‘mountain farm’ that is ‘only fit for sheep.’46 Essentially asking poetry to affect real change, Meliboeus instructs Tityrus to use his ‘talents as a writer / To advertise our farms to city buyers’ or to ‘improve food prices’. Though Tityrus keeps his ‘eye on Congress’,47 he explains to Meliboeus that poetry does not intervene in the actual. Rather, the role of the poet is: To affirm there is such a thing as evil Personified, but ask to be excused From saying on a jury ‘Here’s the guilty.’48

Offering this as his defence of poetry’s sovereignty, Tityrus then tries to inspire Meliboeus to become self-reliant through a series of poetic devices. Tityrus defends the right to aspiration from Meliboeus’s call for ‘socialism’49 by mocking the idea that ‘Bounds’ can be ‘set’ on agricultural ‘ingenuity’, or that punishments can be made for ‘bringing change’ to ‘the unready.’50 Lines 121 and 122 begin with a stressed ‘None’, allowing Tityrus’s statements ‘None shall be as ambitious’ and ‘None should be as ingenious’, to resonate like public oratory. Tityrus’s rhetoric intensifies through his long explanation of the relationship between farmer and land  RFCP, p.319.  RFCP, p.316. 47  RFCP, p.317. 48  RFCP, p.317. 49  RFCP, p.318. 50  RFCP, p.320. 45 46

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which, like reason and the ‘globe’ itself, can be understood as ‘a circle.’51 Using a repeated O in the phrase ‘The world’s one globe’52 to underline his point, the now ‘preaching’53 Tityrus explains the circular relationship between man and land, showing Meliboeus that ‘the market’54 is not advantageous and that he should ‘Plant, breed, produce’55 only what he himself raises or grows. When Tityrus tries to strike agreement with Meliboeus he offers to ‘match’ him ‘deed for deed and plan for plan’,56 using repetition and the metre itself to fortify his argument. By this point in the dialogue, Tityrus has turned the poem’s words into units of measurement for his own purposes, with language being turned ‘in upon’57 itself like soil to reveal the poetry beneath speech. As the poem progresses, Tityrus deploys more Emersonian ideas of selfreliance to sway Meliboeus, whom he advises not to be ‘too much out’58 like most others. An explicit parallel is made between agriculture and poetry when Tityrus asks if he ought to ‘submit’ to his superior in ‘rate of speech and thinking’ or ‘unostentatiously move off’; if he should collaborate when a ‘youngster comes’ to him with ‘half a quatrain’ or refuse.59 As Jo-Marie Claassen highlights, the word ‘rate’ in the phrase ‘rate of speech and thinking’ is quantitative, implying that the ‘rate’ of production is not to be mistaken for quality of product.60 Recalling Emerson’s truism ‘the inmost in due time becomes the outmost’,61 Tityrus’s advice to Meliboeus is to ‘Steal away’62 into oneself and, most importantly, ‘make a late start to market’.63 Going to market was an important metaphor for both Frost and Virgil. For Virgil, it represented the liminal boundary between city and  RFCP, p.322.  RFCP, p.322. 53  RFCP, p.322. 54  RFCP, p.323. 55  RFCP, p.323. 56  RCFP, p.323. 57  RFCP, p.323. 58  RFCP, p.324 59  RFCP, p.324. 60  Jo-Marie Claassen, ‘Robert Frost’s “Build Soil”: A Modern Text based on an Ancient Mode, The Pastoral’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, October 1985, No. 65 (October 1985), p.7. 61  Emerson, ‘The Poet’, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume B. 1820–1865, edited by Nina Baym (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), p.1163. 62  RFCP, p.325. 63  RFCP, p.322. 51 52

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country in the eclogues64 and for Frost the market represented the poet in public. In interview, he effectively paraphrases Tityrus’s advice, describing how one ought to ‘be within oneself’ before one ‘comes out to market with other folks’65 while, in his essay ‘The Doctrine of Excursions’, he explains ‘[a] writer can live by writing to himself alone for days and years’ but ‘[s]ooner or later to go on he must be read.’66 Tityrus’s advice to Meliboeus, then, is essentially a warning against selling goods prematurely and a restating of Frost’s belief that poetry should be perfected before being presented to the reader. Asking a sceptical Meliboeus if he has been persuaded by this ‘bargain’, his reply ‘I can tell better after I get home’ when ‘it all comes back to me’67 is replete with irony. The poem’s ambiguous ending can be explained by certain biographical details. Tyler Hoffman notes that Ferner Nuhn, ‘a family friend who worked for a time in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration’,68 wrote to Frost about the fiscal self-reliance Tityrus advocates in ‘Build Soil’. In his letter to Frost, Nuhn argued that ‘farmers and poets and machine-tenders, we’ve all got beyond self-containment economically; the mode has passed; the emphasis is misplaced’.69 Nuhn adds that the quiet, self-sustaining contentment of small farmers like Meliboeus would aid ‘the real surplus-grabbers’ and would lead to further exploitation. In an unsent reply to Nuhn, Frost explains ‘[b]oth those people in the dialogue are me’.70 Hoffman reasons that our ‘ability to see Frost in Meliboeus is hampered somewhat by Frost’s remarks outside his poetry, which suggest a clearer ideological connection with Tityrus.’71 Read less as a lecture and more as a self-dialogue, the poem’s ending becomes humorously self-contradicting. Concluding ‘Build Soil’ with Meliboeus’s withdrawal into his farm and his deferment (‘I can tell better after I get home’),72 Frost, with a wink to the reader, contradicts the earlier warning against going prematurely to the 64  Claassen, ‘Robert Frost’s “Build Soil”: A Modern Text based on an Ancient Mode, The Pastoral’, p.10. 65  Quoted by Claassen, p.10. 66  Frost, ‘The Doctrine of Excursions’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.129. 67  RFCP, p.325. 68  Tyler Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), p.229. 69  Quoted by Hoffman, p.229. 70  Quoted by Hoffman, p.229. 71  Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, p.229. 72  RFCP, p.325.

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market with an unfinished product, undercutting the certainty of Tityrus’s speech. As Frost writes in another letter: ‘[t]hey think I’m a no New Dealer. But really and truly I’m not, you know, all that clear on it.’73 The conclusion, then, writes back to lines 48–52 where poetry asks ‘to be excused’ from giving a direct answer. In this indeterminacy, Frost aligns himself with Virgil, whose Eclogues, as Christine Perkell notes, have also been ‘susceptible to contradictory readings’74 due to the historical tendency to hear Virgil as one voice or the other in eclogues one and nine. While Nuhn’s misreading of ‘Build Soil’ demonstrates how Frost’s persona affected how his poems were understood (and often to the detriment of their complexity), the unposted response highlights Frost’s sense of the eclogue form as a space in which the poet’s self-divisions can serve as a model of productive tension for a highly complex political treatment. Heaney incorporates contemporary political issues into Electric Light’s ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, where, like ‘Build Soil’, national issues are treated in an ironic framework. As its title implies, ‘Glanmore Eclogue’ is partly a self-commentary on Heaney’s career and takes the form of a dialogue between ‘Poet’, presumably Heaney, and Myles. Referring to the Glanmore cottage Heaney first rented from Ann Saddlemyer in 1972 to write the poems of North (1975), as Bernard O’Donoghue highlights, ‘Glanmore Eclogue’ makes numerous connections with other Irish writers. Heaney has described the Glanmore cottage as the place where he first felt he could make writing ‘sufficiently the center of [his] life’;75 this is apt, since the cottage was built on the family estate of playwright J. M. Synge, who is referred to in the poem as ‘Meliboeus’. Myles tells ‘Poet’ that Augusta (Saddlemyer) has ‘more right than most’ to inhabit the land because, as scholar of Meliboeus (Synge), she ‘knows the big glen inside out’. Alluding to Synge’s writings,76 Myles adds:

73  Frost, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, edited by Mark Richardson and Richard Poirier (New York: Library of America, 1995), p.885. 74  Christine Perkell, ‘Vergil Reading His Twentieth-Century Readers: A Study of Eclogue 9’, Vergilius (1959–), Vol. 47, 2001, The Vergilian Century, p.64. 75  James Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1979, p.7. 76  O’Donoghue notes Heaney refers ‘to two of the best-known details of Synge’s writing career: he signed himself as “Tramp” or “Tramper”’and his play In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), which is directly quoted in the phrase ‘out in the rain falling’. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney’s Classics and the Bucolic’, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p.115.

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Talk about changed lives! Those were the days— Land Commissions making tenants owners, Empire taking note at last too late… But now with all this money coming in And peace being talked up, the boot’s on the other foot, First it was Meliboeus’ people Went to the wall, now it will be us. Small farmers here are priced out of the market.77

The references here to ‘Land Commissions’ and ‘Empire’ plant the poem firmly in Irish history, while the ‘priced out’ local farmers recall the major themes of Virgil’s original eclogues and Frost’s ‘Build Soil’, where contemporary farmers struggle in post-Great Depression America. Disillusioned with ‘peace’ and the ‘money coming in’, Heaney’s eclogue differs from Frost’s in referring not to economic downturn but to the fiscal policies that led to greater inequality and, eventually, the 2008 recession in Ireland. Allison Carruth notes that throughout Electric Light Heaney attempts ‘to give voice to the irrevocable transformations of local places’ which occurred during Ireland’s period of economic growth during the 1990s, adding that, by the time Heaney was composing the volume, the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger was petering out’ and ‘the economic “miracle” forecasters had promised’78 had failed to live up to its expectations. In conversation with Paul Muldoon at the 2008 New Yorker Festival, just one week after Ireland officially entered recession,79 Heaney, with characteristic droll, commented that he felt ‘uneasy’ and ‘less at home’ in Ireland as the country became ‘very prosperous’, adding that he, like many others, ‘relished it but disbelieved it slightly’. He then quotes Marie Heaney’s premonition: ‘this Celtic Tiger is quite soon going to turn into a rug.’80 A comic pessimism is tangible in ‘Glanmore Eclogue’ when the

 EL, pp.35–36.  Allison Carruth, ‘On Bog Lands and Digital Markets: Seamus Heaney’s Recent Poetry’, Pacific Coast Philology, 2011, Vol. 46, No. 2, Special Issue: Literature, Culture, and the Environment (2011), p.239. 79  The New Yorker Festival was held on 4th October 2008; Ireland fell into recession on 25th September, web. 80  ‘Seamus Heaney on poetry – The New Yorker Festival’, Youtube, The New Yorker, 23 July, 2014, web. 77 78

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fall of ‘Meliboeus’ people’—81 the Protestant upper-­middle class—is made to feel like a prophecy of a crash to come. Myles then tells the poet: Book-learning is the thing. You’re a lucky man. No stock to feed, no milking times, no tillage Nor blisters on your hand nor weather-worries.82

The lines recall the speech of Frost’s Meliboeus, who tells the poet Tityrus ‘The Muse takes care of you’ and ‘You live by writing / Your poems on a farm and call that farming.’83 The irony in ‘Glanmore Eclogue’ is that this belittlement of ‘Book-learning’ and art is followed by a request for art to do its work, albeit in ‘words the rest of us / Can understand’. The ‘Poet’ answers by singing a song which, as O’Donoghue notes, references ‘one of the most loved of all the poems in Old Irish, in a language that parodies the style of early-twentieth-century translators’.84 One senses that, like ‘Build Soil’, there is much more going on beneath the surface action at the conclusion of this eclogue. The poet here is reconnecting the listener (Myles) to a sense of his Irishness; yet it seems that Heaney is slyly getting one over here on Myles, who is apparently not aware of the irony that his Irishness is only available to him through English, which can only provide a clumsy, inauthentic approximation to the real thing in translation. Here there may be echoes of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907) and the controversy that led to riots in the Abbey Theatre. Considering the Playboy legacy, Conor Cruise O’Brien argues: The Playboy of the Western World (1907) offended nationalist opinion for essentially the same reasons as Countess Cathleen had done: they showed the Catholic people of the country—‘peasants’—in what their urbanized children considered to be an unfavourable light. In fact, it was not the peasants, but their urbanized descendants, whom Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory disliked.85

 EL, p.36.  EL, p.36. 83  RFCP, p.316. 84  Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney’s Classics and the Bucolic’, p.116. 85  Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), p.70. 81 82

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What sort of relationship, then, are we to imagine between ‘Glanmore Eclogue’ and Playboy, or between Heaney and Synge? Is Heaney really showing contempt for the Celtic Tiger wealthy, as Synge did the urbanised theatre-going Dubliners; or is he mocking Myles, the misguided gatekeeper of authentic Ireland; or is he parodying the translators, who offer up the kind of stage Irishman and Romantic Ireland that Yeats once called a ‘humorist’s Arcadia’?86 It may be fair to say that Heaney, like Frost and the New Deal, is perhaps not ‘all that clear on it’,87 because, as his comments at the New Yorker festival indicate, he is aware that he too is part of this newly prosperous Ireland and that, as an Irish writer writing in English, he, like the Celtic Revivalists before him, is to some extent both preserver and destroyer of his own tradition. Perhaps, then, in ‘Glanmore Eclogue’ Heaney is, to borrow Tityrus’s phrase, asking to be ‘excused’ from saying ‘“Here’s the guilty”’. Much like it does in ‘Build Soil’, the dialogic structure seems to be functioning to manage and ironise the poet’s genuinely mixed feelings at a key moment in the nation’s history. Heaney’s ‘Eclogue IX’ also shares significant parallels with ‘Build Soil’. Heaney’s version of Virgil’s eclogue follows the original closely, making only minor changes to anchor the text in Ireland. Meeting in the road on the way to town, Heaney’s dejected Moeris—an equivalent to Frost’s Meliboeus—informs Lycidas that ‘An outsider’ has claimed ‘our bit of ground’.88 Unable to imagine the nation without Menalcas’s songs of ‘swans’,89 Lycidas tries to persuade a self-deprecating Moeris to sing despite his ‘going’90 voice and loss of memory. In its friendly dynamic and its commentary on poetry’s function in politically volatile times, ‘Eclogue IX’ writes back to Heaney’s opening essay from The Government of the Tongue where he tells the story of a failed recording session with singer and friend David Hammond, the subject of ‘The door was open and the house was dark’ from Human Chain (2010) and the earlier poem, ‘The Singer’s House’, from Field Work (1979). In his essay, ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Checkov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, Heaney explains he and Hammond were to record ‘songs and poems’ but on their ‘way to the studio, a number of explosions occurred in the city and the air was full of 86  W. B. Yeats, ‘Introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry’, Writing on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p.5. 87  Frost, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, p.885. 88  EL, p.31. 89  EL, p.32. 90  EL, p.34.

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sirens’.91 Ultimately, the two decided that ‘to sing’ when ‘others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offence against their suffering’ and they ‘both drove off into the destroyed evening.’92 These same sentiments are echoed in song by Lycidas and Moeris in ‘Eclogue IX’. Exactly ‘half-way’ between destinations, Lycidas designates ‘The old green hedge’ as their singing post in a sentence that has effective aural symmetry, maximised by clever comma use. A reciprocal assonance is created in ‘Here where they’ and the responding ‘here’s where we’re’, meanwhile, ‘sing’ fittingly echoes ‘trimmed’ and ‘green’ to give the speech poetic power. Lycidas continues to implore, assuring Moeris that ‘if it looks like rain’, the two can ‘walk and sing’, which is all the better, since ‘singing shortens the road’. For Lycidas, song helps man endure their existence and, ‘like nature’, is ‘self-justifying and creative’,93 as Heaney argues of Mandelstam in ‘Nero’. The ideas of art’s value in troubled times that pervade The Government of the Tongue flow through Lycidas and Moeris’s discussion in ‘Eclogue IX’, which concludes with Moeris’s dismissive-sounding statement, ‘When the real singer comes’—Menalcas— ‘we’ll sing in earnest.’ As in Virgil’s original ninth eclogue and Frost’s ‘Build Soil’, the two sides in ‘Eclogue IX’ represent different aspects of the poet. There are certainly traces of Heaney’s critical voice in Moeris’s statement ‘we’ll sing in earnest’, since the word ‘earnest’ is a particularly significant one in Heaney’s critical lexicon. In his reading of Frost’s ‘Directive’, the imaginative activity that takes place in the ‘playhouse’ causes it to become equal to the ‘house in earnest’.94 In the context of ‘Eclogue IX’ the word ‘earnest’ operates in a similar way, underlining what is already clear from the increasingly emotive language of Lycidas’s speech: the two have been singing in a way that is fit to match the ‘real’ singing for Menalcas. As in ‘Build Soil’, then, in ‘Eclogue IX’ the poet’s self-divisions are temporarily resolved in a two-sided form that comes to represent, through its very literariness, a therapeutic corrective to the often hard-toendure reality of the world.

 GT, p.xi.  GT, p.xi. 93  GT, p.xix. 94  Redress, p.xv. Emphasis added. 91 92

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iii There is a sense of a weight being lifted throughout Electric Light, with multiple kinds of ‘lightness’ being explored. In his 2001 Guardian piece, Heaney comments that the volume focusses on ‘moments that were radiant or distressful at the time’ that have ‘come back in the light of a more distanced and more informed consciousness’95 and, aside from the literal light of the volume’s title poem, images of lightness, levitation, air and airiness pervade the book. The volume’s other eclogue, ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, is replete with metaphysical imagery while the opening poems subtly establish this airiness that flows through the volume, especially ‘At Toombridge’ where Heaney declares ‘negative ions in the open air / Are poetry to me’96 in a poem designed to bridge the past and present. This imagery is mirrored by the ‘air / that is water’97 of ‘Perch’, the ‘Sifting lightness’98 of ‘Lupins’, and the ‘open-air procession’ and ‘windless light’99 of ‘Out of the Bag’. The volume’s preoccupation with air-climbing, both as an act of joy and defiance, is also present in the Yeatsian ‘At Ballynahinch Lake’, where the issues of translation and mortality are contemplated. The air-heaving of the ‘waterbirds’100 on the lake is echoed in succeeding poems by images of garments ‘strung on air’101 in ‘The Clothes Shrine’, and the once heavy bookcase—containing Frost—now ‘grown so light’102 in ‘The Bookcase’. The cumulative effect of this levitation imagery is felt in the volume’s longer poems which are formally freer and more expansive than the poetry of Heaney’s preceding collections. The ubiquitous air and light imagery of Electric Light connects every poem in the volume to the eclogues, where art’s relation to life is plumbed in song, the poetry of the air. However, when Electric Light is compared to Frost’s famously Virgil inspired volume, North of Boston, several important differences become clear. In his unpublished preface to the volume, Frost describes how the

 Heaney, ‘Lux Perpetua’, web.  EL, p.3. 97  EL, p.4. 98  EL, p.5. 99  EL, p.8. 100  EL, p.26. 101  EL, p.27. 102  EL, p.52. 95 96

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poems were written ‘in a form suggested by the eclogues of Virgil’,103 implying that the eclogue exerts a diffuse influence over the whole collection. ‘The Death of a Hired Man’ is a neat demonstration of how Virgil’s influence manifests, since the poem recycles themes from the eclogues that most interest Frost (and Heaney). Structured as a conversation between the characters Mary and Warren about the return of their ‘worn out’104 farm hand Silas, the poem rides on the melting of the couple’s waning empathy, with Mary’s pity being repeatedly met with Warren’s cold pragmatism. Recalling how Silas ‘fought / All through July’105 with Harold Wilson, ‘a likely lad’106 who pursued ‘education’107 over farm labouring, Mary appeals to Warren’s emotions by describing Silas’s confused and lingering resentments: Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin. He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying He studied Latin, like the violin, Because he liked it—that an argument!108

These lines echo the comments of Meliboeus in ‘Build Soil’, Moeris in ‘Eclogue IX’, and Myles in ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, who all question the value of words in the daily struggle of land subsistence. Indeed, the reference to ‘Latin’ here may even be Frost’s acknowledgement of his debt to Virgil. Ultimately, ‘Death of a Hired Man’ is, like Heaney’s ‘Eclogue IX’, a singing contest between ‘school’ and farming, the imaginative and the actual. In ‘Above the Brim’, Heaney argues that this is a false binary, and that Frost’s level of downward pressure on reality provides the foundation for the lyrical altitude achieved later. Heaney’s comments could easily have been inspired by ‘The Death of a Hired Man’, which ends on a particularly sombre note. Recalling the dramatic conclusion of ‘“Out, Out-”’, the poem Heaney admired early in his career for its ‘wintry report’,109 the Virgilian form of ‘The Death of a Hired Man’ provides Frost a broad 103  Frost, ‘North of Boston’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.196. 104  RFCP, p.35. 105  RFCP, p.36. 106  RFCP, p.36. 107  RFCP, p.36. 108  RFCP, p.37. 109  Seamus Heaney, ‘Above the Brim’, p.293.

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canvas for a grim portrayal of mortality, one in which he can exploit emotion through the competing, songlike speech of authentic characters. Matthew Parfitt argues that Frost’s reputation as a ‘dark’ poet derives partly from the misapprehension that he has subverted the georgic/ eclogue tradition by ‘failing to depict Arcadia’ but, characterising Frost as not so much dark as ‘unflinching’, Parfitt contends the tone of Frost’s work is ‘consistent’ with the classical tradition ‘in which nature is not an idealised stage-set but the context for the struggle for subsistence’.110 Virgil appeals to Frost and to Heaney because they appreciate how the eclogue form often exists in tension with the bleak reality of its content. In Frost’s critical phrase, the form provides the necessary ‘momentary stay against confusion.’111 ‘Home Burial’ also exemplifies Frost’s absorption and application of the Virgilian mode. Described by Heaney in ‘Above the Brim’ as ‘one of the best of Frost’s dramatic eclogues, with all the rigour and despatch of Greek tragedy’,112 the poem is structured as a dialogue between a married couple grieving the loss of their child and builds towards a dramatic conclusion: ‘If—you—do!’ She was opening the door wider. ‘Where do you mean to go?  First tell me that. I’ll follow and bring you back by force.  I will!—’113

Again, the form allows Frost to conduct a songlike call and response between the couple, paced to give its climax maximum impact. Noting Randall Jarrell’s extensive line-by-line commentary of the poem, Heaney summarises that, in the ‘perfectly pitched anger’ of these lines, Frost captures the primal ‘rising note out of the fallen condition’,114 one that is achieved not through a departure of reality but from downward pressure on the actual. Heaney sees that within the ‘beguiling melodies’ of a poem like ‘Home Burial’ there is ‘a strong awareness of that unbeguiling world

110  Matthew Parfitt, ‘Robert Frost’s “Modern Georgics”’, The Robert Frost Review, No. 6 (Fall 1996), p.54. 111  Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson, p. 132. 112  Heaney, ‘Above the Brim’, p.285. 113  RFCP, pp.54–55. 114  Heaney, ‘Above the Brim’, p.286.

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to which the melodies themselves offer a conscious resistance.’115 The Virgilian structure of ‘Home Burial’ heightens this sense of defiance, since, as Heaney comments elsewhere, the eclogue form itself is a mode of ‘resistance’, exerting a ‘vindictive artistry against the actual conditions of the times.’116 It is often commented that Heaney’s sensitive readings of key moments in the poetry of others underscore his ambitions for his own work. However, the inspired commentary on Frost’s achievement in ‘Above the Brim’ highlights Heaney’s failure to provide his own readers with equivalent moments in the Virgil inspired poems of Electric Light. Heaney confronts the actual conditions of his own times without providing a ‘rising note’117 in ‘Known World’, a poem that has several points of connection to the eclogues of the volume. Dated May 1998, the poem juxtaposes Heaney’s memories of the 1978 ‘Struga / Poetry Festival’118 with images of human suffering in the Yugoslav conflicts across 7 sections of varying length. Though not in a dialogue form comparable to Frost’s North of Boston poems, ‘Known World’ does make effective use of quoted speech in a sprawling form that O’Driscoll describes as uncharacteristically ‘looseweave’.119 The poem enmeshes multiple histories, languages, and literary references, even describing a line of refugees as being like ‘a syrup of Styx’,120 an offstage ‘tragedy going on / Uncomprehended’.121 Echoing both ‘Eclogue IX’ and the essay ‘Nero’, the remembered ‘days and nights’ of the poetry festival in which ‘We hardly ever sobered’122 this time are made to feel like ‘a culpable indulgence’123 in the face of the ‘refugees’ who ‘now’ come ‘loaded on tractor mudguards’ and ‘on each other’s shoulders’.124 The contrasting predicaments of poet and victim also recall Virgil’s first eclogue, where Tityrus keeps his land while Meliboeus is haunted by thoughts of soldiers confiscating his farm. Compared to Heaney’s ‘Eclogue IX’, however, the stakes of ‘Known World’ feel  Ibid., p.285.  SS, p.389. 117  Ibid., p.285. 118  EL, p.19. 119  SS, p.389. 120  EL, p.20. 121  EL, p.21. 122  EL, p.19. 123  ‘Nero’, GT, p.xii. 124  EL, p.20. 115 116

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paralysingly real, with the speaker explicitly questioning ‘Allegory’ before moving to an image of ‘actual granite’,125 where oppositional tension is implicit. The flight home at the poem’s conclusion, ‘courtesy of Lufthansa’,126 feels especially dissonant compared to the birds’ flight of ‘Ballynahinch Lake’ or the anticipation at the conclusion of ‘Eclogue IX’. In ‘Known World’, then, when the moment comes to put the lessons of Virgil’s ‘vindictive artistry’127 into practice, Heaney equivocates, unable to provide ‘the rising note out of the fallen condition’128 that he admires in Frost’s eclogues. The hesitancy of ‘Known World’ leads O’Donoghue to describe Electric Light as ‘a book of denied consolation’,129 yet there are instances when the collection’s Virgilian currents do lead Heaney to consoling classical images similar to those he celebrates in Frost’s poetry. Dedicated to playwright Brian Friel, ‘The Real Names’ shares formal qualities with ‘Known World’ and represents a clear thematic counterpoint, answering the latter’s historical-political treatment by burrowing deep into personal history. ‘The Real Names’ is an affectionate depiction of Heaney’s first discovery of joy in Shakespeare during his third year at St Columb’s, when he was ‘just beginning to be susceptible’ to ‘the magic of Shakespeare’s poetry’.130 Formally, the poem uses the same loose-weave structure of ‘Known World’, stitching together several memories across ten sections. If ‘Known World’ appears agnostic about poetry’s redressing function, ‘The Real Names’ answers with a strong image of verse’s power, especially in its fourth section: Airiness from the start, Me on top of the byre, seeing things In a headier light from that much nearer heaven, Managing to stand up unsupported On the deck-tilt of hot zinc: I’m on a roof That overlooks forever, with a pretend Gully knife of my own in one raised hand, Sawing air with the other (Call it a stage That everyone goes through ahead of time).131

 EL, p.21.  EL, p.22. 127  SS, p.289. 128  Heaney, ‘Above the Brim’, p.286. 129  O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney’s Classics and the Bucolic’, p.118. 130  SS, p.400. 131  EL, pp.46–47. 125 126

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The ‘Airiness’ flowing through the volume manifests here in Shakespeare’s poetry and the airy height of the boy on roof top, sustained by his own imaginative play. Barely controlled by its form, these drifting lines transform the cowshed into something like the playhouse of ‘Directive’, where the poet can enjoy ‘a momentary sense of freedom and wholeness.’132 In ‘The Real Names’ Heaney is visibly drawing the strength he lacks in ‘Known World’ from the purer joy in poetry he felt as a child, a depiction of himself set in deliberate contrast to the professional poet figure presented in the latter poem. After the scene on top of the cow shed Heaney references the ‘willow’ from Hamlet, where the play (within the play) is famously based on Virgil’s Aeneid. As the poem becomes increasingly associative, Shakespeare’s willow feels dreamily connected to the Aeneid’s golden bough, the symbol of poetic prophecy Heaney had translated in Seeing Things. The willow is then swapped for an Irish ‘sally tree’, which, in the context of Electric Light, more strongly evokes the beech tree under which Virgil’s first eclogue begins. Michael Longley also borrows Virgil’s image for his poem ‘The Beech Tree’, which Heaney reads in ‘“In Extremis”’, observing: Longley isn’t just playing at being a character in an eclogue: he is presenting himself as the latest practitioner of the genre, in dialogue with its past masters […] There is indeed intertextuality here, but there is little post-modern belatedness. The irony involved is affectionate, a matter of tone; there is a trust in historical continuity and the viability of classical techniques.133

These comments are revealing for a number of reasons. In addition to the Shakespearean and Virgilian allusions in ‘The Real Names’, Heaney’s description of the ‘unsupported’ boy climbing ‘nearer heaven’134 may be an intertextual salute to Frost’s ‘Birches’, a key text for Heaney in which the boy keeps his ‘poise / To the top branches, climbing carefully’ up ‘Toward heaven’135 and through the scales of imagination. Heaney describes these lines of Frost’s as ‘some of the most familiar in the canon  R, xv.  Heaney, ‘“In Extremis”’, p.2. 134  EL, p.47. 135  RFCP, p.122. 132 133

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of twentieth century verse’, and remarks how the phrase ‘above the brim’ captures simultaneously the boy’s freedom and the poet’s ‘sensation of flourish and supply’136 during an ‘airy vernal daring, an overbrimming of invention’.137 Heaney’s interpretation of Longley’s Virgilian intertextuality, then, may be how he wishes his own to be perceived in ‘The Real Names’, a poem where he is placing ‘trust’ in ‘the viability’ of Electric Light’s ‘classical techniques’ by entering a ‘dialogue’ with the eclogue’s ‘past masters’.138 Indeed, in ‘The Real Names’ the child’s game prefigures the poet’s later creativity, much as it does in ‘Birches’. Frost makes this link explicit when he laments ‘life is too much like a pathless wood’ before dreaming ‘of going back to be’ a ‘swinger of birches’,139 while Heaney’s poem concludes on the suggestive image of the schoolboy waiting ‘for grace’.140 A foreknown outcome is implied in Heaney’s depiction of the cowshed overlooking ‘forever’, simultaneously a ‘stage’ for play and a ‘stage’ gone through ‘ahead of time’,141 thus we see not quite the poet as a boy but the boy as poet. Heaney’s allusions to ‘Birches’ intensify as the section progresses, especially when he describes the tree as ‘two-timing earth and air’ and ‘land and sky’.142 These lines echo Frost’s asking for his wish not to be ‘half’ granted—for him to be snatched away never to return—but for the ability to climb ‘Toward heaven’ and then be set ‘down again’, to experience the feeling of ‘both going and coming back’.143 Heaney identifies this leave-and-return sensation as poetry’s essential nature in his critical writings, where he describes verse as ‘more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo […] the experience of being at the same time summoned and released.’144 The ‘two-timing’ of ‘earth and air’ in ‘The Real Names’ is the chief characteristic of Electric Light and, like Frost in ‘Birches’, one feels Heaney throughout the volume asking not to be ‘misunderstood’ as morose but  Heaney, ‘Above the Brim’, pp.284–85.  Ibid., p.284. 138  Heaney, ‘“In Extremis”’, p.2. 139  RFCP, p.122. 140  EL, p.50. 141  EL, p.47. 142  EL, p.47. 143  RFCP, p.122. 144  ‘The Government of the Tongue’, GT, p.108. 136 137

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seen instead as seeking to go ‘Toward heaven’ and back again. In prose, Heaney explains that the eclogue’s ‘ill fit’ to the world it depicts is an understood component of its function, thus the poet ‘does not need constantly to prove that his reality principle is in working order.’145 It is to this standard Electric Light submits itself. Much is made of the idea of halves throughout the collection, most importantly when Lycidas implores Moeris to sing ‘half-way’146 on their journey but also in the two half-doors that appear in ‘Montana’ and ‘Seeing the Sick’, a poem about the death of Heaney’s father, and the ‘half-­turned’147 key in ‘Ballynahinch Lake’ after the birds take flight. No longer a prisoner to what in ‘Crediting Poetry’ he terms ‘concrete reality’,148 the poet is freer to explore the two sides of the poetic whole: the real and the purely imaginary. Like the bridge of the opening poem, Electric Light straddles the two elements of earth and air, or, to borrow a phrase from ‘The Fragment’, the volume is ‘neither here nor there’, comfortable in the knowledge that ‘the first and last line of any poem’ are not ‘Where the poem begins and ends’.149 For poetry to enjoy such lyrical highness, though, Heaney argues in ‘Above the Brim’ that it must lean counterintuitively on its opposite: the facts that represent its other half. While in the poems of North of Boston this effect is brilliantly compressed, Heaney is reluctant to hang too much on a single poem, preferring to spread the effect throughout Electric Light. Whatever he loses in impact when the individual poems of the volume are compared to those of North of Boston, he gains in originality, notably so in comparison to his earlier work where Frost’s influence is more overt. It is surprising that the shared eclogue is given little critical attention in the Frost-Heaney relationship since, by this time, Heaney was a Nobel Laureate and Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard, enjoying a status comparable to Frost’s, even in America. The intertextuality of Heaney’s eclogues also impacts how his relationship with Virgil can be understood. It is clear from these poems that Heaney did not treat Virgil in isolation; rather, Virgil was one of his essential poets and was held, like Heaney writes of Theodore Roethke, ‘outside movements and generations’.150 In the triangular relationship of Heaney’s eclogues, Frost is not the  Heaney, ‘“In Extremis”’, p.6.  EL, p.34. 147  EL, p.26. 148  CP, p.450. 149  EL, p.57. 150  ‘Canticles to the Earth’, P, p.194. 145 146

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dominating force he was earlier but is finally, and perhaps therapeutically, a poetic equal, and a poet who is, like Heaney himself, an inheritor of the literary past. Through these earlier practitioners of the form, Heaney understands that the two halves of the poetic equation he perceives, the ‘marvellous’151 and the ‘concrete’,152 can coexist, granting his verse not just ‘a momentary stay against confusion’,153 but ‘a momentary sense of freedom and wholeness.’154

iv Heaney’s inspired analysis of the eclogue in ‘“In Extremis”’ indicates a much wider reconceptualisation of poetic form in this phase. In the ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ sequence of Electric Light, the sonnet shape, much like the eclogue, becomes a literary emblem set in deliberate opposition to the real. The sonnet’s role in this wider effort is clear in the sequence’s fourth poem, ‘The Augean Stables’, where the classical meets contemporary sectarian murder in one of the volume’s most dramatic scenes. Such a use of the sonnet represents a major shift in Heaney’s relationship with the form, which he had used effectively in the ‘Glanmore’ sequence of Field Work and the ‘Clearances’ sequence of The Haw Lantern (1987). By the time of Electric Light, the sonnet has become, like the eclogue, not just a space for personal reflection or private mourning but a tool for asserting the primacy of the imagination against a threatening reality. The benefits of what Davis has termed the ‘grafting’155 of Electric Light can be seen in Heaney’s next volume, District and Circle (2006), where the sonnet is deployed for political treatments that emphasise rupture and discontinuity. Like the eclogue, the sonnet has its own unavoidable connotations of literary tradition that threaten to obscure whatever ‘concrete reality’156 the poet hopes to register. But, in the post-9/11 crisis of District and Circle, the form’s sense of literary refinement is used to counterpoint a new, barbaric violence. Published exactly forty years after his debut collection Death of a Naturalist (1966), District and Circle writes back to several of Heaney’s  CP, p.458.  CP, p.450. 153  Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, p. 132. 154  ‘Introduction’, R, p.xv. 155  Davis, ‘From Mossbawn to Meliboeus: Seamus Heaney’s Ambivalent Pastoralism’, p.114. 156  CP, p.450. 151 152

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earlier poems while at the same time incorporating a much wider spectrum of concerns than his previous volumes, such as the spiralling conflict in the Middle East and ecological disaster. This thematic expansiveness contrasts with a formal narrowness, however, as, more often than not, Heaney’s poems in District and Circle take a single form: the sonnet. Though Heaney had used sonnets effectively in his work before, in District and Circle the fourteen-line form becomes part of a wider effort to process history and manage the unassimilable events that defined (and continue to define) the twenty-first century. Heaney’s deployment of the form strongly implies the reactivation of the influence of Lowell, a poet who, besides being one of the most noted sonneteers in American poetry, ‘staked out history’157 as his work’s major theme, in Helen Vendler’s phrase, and even titled one of his sonnet volumes simply History (1973). Heaney comes to realise, as Lowell earlier did, that the sonnet’s connotations of literary tradition along with its easily recognised fourteen-line shape and familiar inner symmetries make it ripe for subversion in self-sabotaging public poems. Many of Heaney’s political treatments in District and Circle recall Lowell’s public-spirited sonnets from the 1970s—those that were overshadowed by his notorious reproduction of private material in the form. Nonetheless, Heaney’s later use of the sonnet mirrors Lowell’s in critical ways and indicates a major, if selective, re-engagement with the American poet who had earlier served as his public champion. Though Heaney avoids what he terms Lowell’s ‘overweening’158 streak in his own later public poems, the irregular sonnets of District and Circle undoubtedly owe something to Lowell, who had personally advised a young Heaney on his use of the form in the 1970s when he was composing the ‘Glanmore’ sequence of Field Work. Many poems in District and Circle thus work as intriguing comparisons with Lowell’s work, highlighting overlooked areas of reciprocity in a phase when Lowell had become something of a stealth presence in Heaney’s writing. This personal dynamic aside, it is clear that for both Heaney and Lowell the sonnet provides a common ground on which poet and reader can co-operatively process shared memories and difficult truths. In their hands, the form’s frail border becomes a 157  Helen Vendler, The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2003), p.5. 158  Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell’, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, edited by Ian Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.315.

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monument to the endurance of history’s onslaught, with the sonnet’s give and take allowing the actual to be reified and ameliorated. Believed to have originated in Italy around the year 1230,159 the sonnet form owes its longevity to its adaptability and to certain key exponents of the form in English. In his valuable and wide-ranging recent study, The Sonnet (2019), Stephen Regan notes: [i]t was not until the early sixteenth century that the sonnet became established in the vernacular languages of Britain, France, and Spain. The Petrarchan sonnet enjoyed a new lease of life in courtly circles, often introduced by diplomats travelling between Italy and other European countries. The first sonnets in English were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, both closely associated with the court of Henry VIII. Some of these sonnets are rough translations and versions of Petrarch’s Rime, but in their concern with decorum, conduct, and eloquence they articulate the values and attitudes of English court life.160

Such imperial origins present a challenge, and an opportunity, for nonEnglish poets for whom writing in the sonnet unavoidably raises cultural-­ political questions of loyalty and identity. Contemporary British poet Jeff Hilson speaks for generations of writers when he notes that the form remains ‘broadly representational of the kind of poetry I was trying to avoid—it’s virtually a synecdoche for the poetic tradition itself, its most venerable and enduring object.’161 The dilemma Hilson identifies is augmented for Irish and American poets, for whom the political consequences of defining oneself as continuous with or divergent from the English tradition are much more complex. Regan identifies Thomas O’Donagh’s Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916) as an influential text on the development of an ‘Irish sonnet’, noting that O’Donagh advocated an adaption of the English sonnet for Irish purposes as part of the wider Celtic Revival, whereby it would capture ‘the rhythms of Irish music or Anglo-Irish speech in its rhythms, rather than attempting to follow the usual metrical patterns of English verse.’162 Heaney memorably asserts his own Irish voice in the  Stephen Regan, The Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p.5.  Ibid., p.8. 161  Jeff Hilson, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnets, edited by A.  D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.12. 162  Regan, The Sonnet, p.158. 159 160

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second poem of the Glanmore sonnets when he describes himself as ‘landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore’.163 The sonnet was also adapted in America, where the form’s confining effect and European heritage worked in productive tension with the ‘deeply felt urge to write about America’ and the ‘pioneering poetic expansiveness’164 established by Walt Whitman. Both experimenting with the sonnet form in non-English poetic traditions at roughly the same time, unsurprisingly the sonnet represents a large and complicated element of the intertextual relationship between Heaney and Lowell. Meg Tyler has made a number of astute observations about the sonnet history between Heaney and Lowell, one that begins with Lowell providing feedback on draft versions of Field Work’s ‘Glanmore’ sequence and culminates in District and Circle, where ‘two-thirds of the poems’ are ‘fourteen-liners.’165 During the 1970s, Heaney explained that he felt the ‘melodious grace of the English iambic line’ was an ‘affront’ that ‘needed to be wrecked’.166 As Neil Corcoran notes, Heaney identified Lowell as an ally in this endeavour and drew inspiration from his ‘violences upon the English sonnet’.167 As an American working within the sonnet tradition, Lowell’s ‘destruction’168 of the form appealed to Heaney, who sensed that the American poet shared his desire ‘to take the English lyric and make it eat stuff that it has never eaten before’.169 Lowell’s influence was so intense on Heaney during the 1970s that he had even envisaged Field Work at one stage as a book entirely of sonnets, in the manner of Lowell’s collections Notebook 1967–68 (1969), History, For Lizzie and Harriet (1973), and The Dolphin (1973).170

 FW, p.29.  Regan, The Sonnet, p.220. 165  Meg Tyler, ‘“The Whole of Me A-Patter”: Image, Feeling, and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’, “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances”, p.138; Meg Tyler gave a lecture on the work of Heaney and Michael Longley, in which she explored connections between Heaney’s late forms and Lowell’s sonnets, at Queen’s University Belfast, 2 March, 2016. 166  Frank Kinahan, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, Spring, 1982, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1982), p.412. 167  Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p.63. 168  Ibid., p.257. 169  Harriet Cooke, ‘Interview’, Irish Times, 28 December 1973, p.8. 170  See Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘In the Mid-Course of His Life’, Hibernia, 11 October, 1979, p.8. 163 164

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Prior to their publication in Field Work, Heaney shared drafts of his Glanmore sonnet sequence with Lowell. Lowell’s feedback was lukewarm, and he advised that the poems be made to undergo a formal ‘knocking about’ to avoid becoming too regular and Wordsworthian.171 While Lowell’s response did not discourage Heaney from publishing the poems in sonnet form, it is clear from his remark that the poems were in ‘the wrong form’ that Heaney had misidentified something in Lowell’s sonnets that he had taken to be shared. In the years after Lowell’s death, Heaney’s commentary on the polarising sonnet volumes became less favourable, typically showing an appreciation for Lowell’s artistic intentions but depicting him as a poet obsessed with breaking the sonnet, even describing the sonnet volumes as ‘an error in the end’.172 Heaney praises Lowell for abandoning the form in a review of his final collection Day by Day (1977) and describes his earlier sonnet-­craze as an attempt to ‘cage’ life in an ‘arbitrary fourteen-line template’.173 Later, in ‘Lowell’s Command’, he argues that Lowell’s sonnet volumes were ‘too much under the sway of an imposed power’ and that he felt ‘driven off’ as a reader by the ‘unconceding density of it all.’174 Perhaps this is why, in the anthology Heaney coedited with Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag (1982), only two Lowell poems are included, neither one of which is a sonnet.175 Lowell’s sonnet volumes remain controversial, not just for their adherence to a single form, but for their reworking of personal correspondences between Lowell and his former wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Praising his novel-like sonnet output, Richard Gray characterises Lowell as ‘the greatest poet of the self since the Second World War’176 and describes his sonnets as ‘proof of his Americanness; for, taken together, they constitute an epic of the self’177 in the manner of the Cantos or ‘Song of Myself’. Regan, however, stresses that ‘[s]ome of the finest critics of twentieth-century 171  Heaney recalls this advice in Stepping Stones, p.  216. For Lowell’s full response see Saskia Hamilton, editor, The Letters of Robert Lowell (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp.641–42. 172  Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, p.257. 173  ‘Full Face’, P, p.222. 174  ‘Lowell’s Command’, GT, p.141. 175  The two collected poems are ‘Alfred Coming Clark’ and ‘Child’s Song’. In The School Bag (1997), ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’ is the single Lowell poem collected. 176  Richard Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London and New  York: 1990), p.251. 177  Ibid., p.255.

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poetry have been baffled and bemused by Lowell’s sonnet-mania’, noting that while some admired ‘the sheer energy and range and versatility’178 others objected to the inconsistent, unfinished quality of the poems, not to mention their morally dubious handling of personal material. Though this critical debate raged more on Lowell’s side of the Atlantic than Heaney’s, the mixed responses to Lowell’s sonnets highlights how the ‘Americanness’ of his achievement—its craving for expansiveness, its ambitious reinvention of old forms—could pull him away from Heaney, who typically brought his American influences back, as Edna Longley notes, to a ‘tighter lyrical structure’,179 and developed a more reticent verse after the 1970s. It is significant, therefore, that many Lowell-like features creep back into Heaney’s writing during a much later period of experimentation in the sonnet form. Deliberately inserting themselves into a sonnet-portrait tradition established by Lowell, Heaney’s writer portraits of W. H. Auden, Czesław Miłosz, and Ted Hughes offer the most obvious illustration of Lowell’s influence in District and Circle, but throughout the volume Heaney toys with a number of different sonnet configurations. After the collection’s stage-setting opening poem, ‘The Turnip-Snedder’, Heaney positions two fourteen-line poems together (‘A Shiver’ and ‘Polish Sleepers’) and follows them with the thirteen-­line ‘Anahorish 1944’. This leads to ‘To Mick Joyce in Heaven’, a poem comprised of five fourteenline sections that avoid appearing as sonnets due to the brevity of their lines (the shortest being just two words). A poem that appears later in the volume, ‘Súgán’, further complicates the volume’s sonneteering by stretching to sonnet length depending on how its indented lines are read. Clearly a self-reflexive poem, in ‘Súgán’ Heaney is demonstrating his ability to ‘manipulate’ lines into new structures, like the hand-knotted harvest-bow from Heaney’s eponymous earlier poem referenced in the fourth line by the phrase ‘Turned and tightened’.180 Though only thirteen lines begin in ‘Súgán’, the breaks in lines nine and eleven give the indented phrases individual power, especially in the former instance where ‘ends mesh’ but do not quite meet. Heaney’s choice to break lines nine and eleven might even be his most subtle acknowledgement of the events of September 11th 2001, which is addressed most explicitly in the poem  Regan, The Sonnet, p.276.  Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000), p.274. 180  DC, p.28. 178 179

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‘Anything Can Happen’. In ‘Súgán’, however, the most significant phrase is ‘power to bind and loose’, which cleverly underscores the poet’s new command of the sonnet form. Much of this toying with the form is explicated by the volume’s first sonnet, ‘A Shiver’, where Heaney exhibits newly discovered possibilities. Swinging ‘the sledge’, the speaker feels a sense of power run through him, his ‘lower back’ becoming a shield-like ‘testudo’.181 Both Tyler and Onno Kosters provide incisive readings of the poem that, when combined, help illuminate the sonnet’s statement on its form. Kosters argues the divergences from iambic pentameter come at key moments, as in the triplestressed ‘long-nursed rage’,182 where the line itself staggers from the hammer’s blow.183 A similar effect is achieved in the shaved eleventh line which reads simply ‘Withholdable at will’,184 as if the hammer has literally left a mark on the form. Yet the final line where the ‘earth’ is felt shivering ‘in the handle’185 reverses this action. Tyler notes the significance of Heaney’s choosing to end the poem with a question mark and suggests the ploy ‘takes the inwardness of a sonnet and pushes it awkwardly outward, as if toward a listening audience […] the sonnet has been reconfigured.’186 At the poem’s inverted conclusion, then, we can read the question mark and shivers as shockwaves running back through the poem, allowing the sonnet to be seen not as the hammer’s target but as the hammer itself, with the formal irregularities Kosters highlights no longer reading as the poem’s injuries endured by an external force but as evidence of its own power. Given the extensive references in District and Circle to Heaney’s earlier poems and Lowell’s role in the evolution of Heaney’s sonnet years prior to this, ‘A Shiver’ could even be read as a literalisation of Lowell’s earlier advice. In this new configuration, the sonnet is not ‘knocked about’187 to simply avoid metrical regularity for stylistic purposes; rather, the formal dents evidence the poem’s contact with reality, its

 DC, p.5.  DC, p.5. 183  Onno Kosters, ‘“Wafts of what conspired”: Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle and the Holocaust’, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2014), p.148. 184  DC, p.5. 185  DC, p.5. 186  Tyler, ‘“The Whole of Me A-Patter”: Image, Feeling, and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’, p.134. 187  Hamilton, The Letters of Robert Lowell, p.641. 181 182

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ability to press back against reality’s pressure like the ‘testudo’188 of its opening lines. Heaney thus transforms the sonnet from a fixed fourteenline unit into a productive force and a means of encountering the actual. ‘A Shiver’, then, might also indicate Heaney’s new way of reading Lowell’s blank sonnets. Elsewhere in the volume, Heaney’s overtly political sonnets share with Lowell’s certain methods of self-sabotage to denote fragility and loss. Heaney’s approach to public memory throughout District and Circle, particularly in those poems focussing on the contemporary conflict (‘Anything Can Happen’, ‘Helmet’, ‘Out of Shot’), grants the reader a more active role in what Heaney has termed the ‘horizon of consciousness within which poet and audience operate.’189 When considering Heaney’s sonnets in District and Circle alongside Lowell’s use of the form, one has the unique opportunity to compare Heaney’s portrayal of American conflict with Lowell’s treatment of the theme most associated with Heaney: the political violence of Northern Ireland. First appearing in History, the sonnet ‘Identification in Belfast’ purportedly quotes the direct speech of Joseph Parker, whose son, Stephen, was killed in one of a series of explosions carried out by the Provisional IRA in Belfast on the 21st of July 1972, a day which came to be known as Bloody Friday. Michael Hinds notes that the poem was probably written after Lowell saw a BBC television interview in which Parker discussed the death of his son, broadcast on the 26th of July and again in November of 1972, and described the ordeal of identifying Stephen’s badly disfigured body by a box of joke-matches in his pocket.190 There is blatant irony behind Lowell’s changing Stephen’s name to ‘Richard’ in the sonnet, as the move causes the subject of the poem titled ‘Identification’ to be misidentified. In the poem itself, Lowell modifies Stephen’s religion by depicting the child at ‘mass’,191 strongly implying to a Northern Irish reader that he was a Catholic. Joseph Parker is actually identified in his  DC, p.5.  SS, p.407. 190  Michael Hinds delivered the paper ‘Unoriginality and Pathos: “Identification in Belfast’” at ‘Robert Lowell and Ireland: A Centenary Symposium’ 3–5 March 2017 and published the chapter, ‘Name and Shame: “Identification in Belfast”’, in Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry, edited by Eve Cobain and Philip Coleman (Peter Lang AG International Academic Publishers, 2020), pp.  117–192. A segment of Parker’s original interview is included 44.27 minutes into this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1iH3z8EhY. 191  RLCP, p.596. 188 189

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interview as a Church of Ireland Reverend and became a campaigner for peace after Stephen’s death. Much of this manipulation of detail is connected to the choice of form itself. Though not one of Lowell’s best known or most ambitious public poems, the formal features typical of his sonnets work very effectively here. The dashes at the end of lines five, twelve, and thirteen effectively conjure the grieving father’s paralysis while the shift from ‘matches’ to ‘bomb’ works on one level as a corollary and, on another, as a point of contrast, since the ‘matches’ are merely the innocent ‘joke-matches’192 of the child, making his presence at the site of the bombing feel both incongruous and eerily predestined. The form’s compactness also pushes the lightness of the child’s ‘blond’ hair into close contrast with the ‘dark’ bomb that singed it, causing him to be misidentified, while the double ‘couldn’t’ in line thirteen—representing a quarter of the line’s total words—causes the poem to hiccup, much like the matches that fail to light. Lowell’s signature ellipsis is also evocative of Parker’s failed matchlighting at the end of line eleven, with the fade to silence effectively recreating on the page the father’s diminishing hopes, a simple device that nonetheless demonstrates the power of words—and silence. In the concluding line, the ellipsis is answered, not by the match’s flame but with the flat statement, ‘Then I knew he was Richard’, ending the poem in the anticipated identification that is, in reality, a misidentification. The sonnet form is being exploited here on several levels, with its connotations of literary refinement making the allocated fourteen lines feel like a commissioned monument to the life cut short. Unlike traditional memorials, however, the poem refuses to console or remember. Implicating both the ‘British Army’ and ‘the Provisionals’, Lowell paints a picture devoid of heroism. The form’s inherent sense of its own ending stresses the loss of life while the sonnet’s capacity for sequence-making is redolent of the titfor-tat cycle of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and implies that somewhere, offstage, another match is being lit. Showing the maker’s hand by renaming the boy, Lowell emphasises that poetry does not play a primarily documentary role; rather, poetry is, in Heaney’s phrase, ‘the imaginative transformation of human life […] through which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.’193

 RLCP, p.596.  R, p.xv.

192 193

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Heaney uses the responsive function of the sonnet in this same way in ‘Out of Shot’ to depict a global cycle of violence. The poem depicts a mortar explosion in an Iraqi market and is the third in a trilogy of poems about the contemporary East-West conflict in District and Circle. ‘Out of Shot’ draws on the sonnet’s duel private and public nature to demonstrate the contemporary experience of being disturbed by images that are increasingly ubiquitous in media coverage. Beginning on a ‘November morning’194 where Heaney is dreamily contemplating ‘livestock’ along the ‘Wicklow bay’, the ‘Viking vik’ seemingly causes him to remember the ‘Norse raids’ of his earlier poem ‘North’. The turn between the octave and sestet where ‘no attack’ becomes a ‘shock / Out of the blue’, however, recalls the ‘clear blue sky’195 of the Horatian Ode ‘Anything Can Happen’, published roughly eight weeks after the events of 9/11 and positioned just two poems prior in the volume. Like ‘Identification in Belfast’, ‘Out of Shot’ centres on a ‘TV news’196 report that haunts the poet, but it is no longer just the Norse raids of the mind that trouble Heaney but the terrorism of the present, where images can ‘shock’ and appear ‘Out of the blue’ on ‘TV’ screens across the world. In her own detailed reading of ‘Out of Shot’, Tyler notes the allusions to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ in the repetitions of ‘loosed’ and ‘lost’ as well as the poem’s deviations from its Petrarchan rhyme scheme.197 Conscious of the literary material he is working with, Heaney is, as he was in the eclogues of Electric Light, in dialogue with the sonnet’s past masters and is setting the full force of its literary history in vindictive opposition to reality. For instance, it is significant that ‘Out of Shot’ directly follows ‘Helmet’, a poem that depicts the helmet that Bostonian fireman Bobby Breen gifted to Heaney. Coming immediately after the images of the overturned ‘tallest towers’198 of ‘Anything Can Happen’, ‘Helmet’ intensifies the volume’s engagement with the images of 9/11 before Heaney turns to the spiralling conflict depicted in ‘Out of Shot’. The line that concludes ‘Helmet’ (and which directly precedes ‘Out of Shot’) is ‘hard-reared shield-wall’,199 a phrase that implies the sense in which the sonnet form is  DC, p.15.  DC, p.13. 196  DC, p.15. 197  Tyler, ‘“The Whole of Me A-Patter”: Image, Feeling, and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’, p.133. 198  DC, p.13. 199  DC, p.15. 194 195

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a ‘testudo’,200 not just a space for private reflection but a means of active defence against the actual. The thematic continuity of ‘Anything Can Happen’, ‘Helmet’, and ‘Out of Shot’ further implies the sonnet’s shielding function while the modification of the rhyme scheme, similar to Lowell’s renaming in ‘Identification in Belfast’, deliberately reveals to us the architect at work. Like the lost donkey ‘Loosed from a cart that had loosed five mortar shells’,201 Heaney’s jagged and irregular sonnet may be shell-shocked but it is also shock-making, engaging reality—to reapply Heaney’s description of Lowell’s sonnets—‘head-on’,202 a term invested by the preceding poem ‘Helmet’ with fresh, punny meaning. This self-reflexive use of the sonnet form is most effective in District and Circle’s title poem, a series of five sections in which the sonnet form is pulverised to thirteen lines before partially recovering. There is no equivalent sequence in Lowell’s sonnet collections, but Heaney’s deconstruction of the fourteen-line frame to treat a public event in ‘District and Circle’ recalls Lowell’s use of the form in his earlier sonnet ‘Inauguration Day: January 1953’, from Life Studies (1959). Referring to the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as 34th President of the United States, the poem offers a grim portrayal of America’s idealised national history working against itself. Subverting the sonnet shape and structure from the outset, Lowell presents the poem ‘split apart’203 on the page for visual impact, with the sestet-like second section comprising only five lines, similar to Heaney’s sonnet-teasing throughout District and Circle. In his perceptive reading of ‘Inauguration Day’, Michael Thurston notes that the poem’s imagery of New  York’s Peter Stuyvesant statue and Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb echoes Lowell’s other monument-critiquing poems (‘For the Union Dead’, ‘The March I’) but that on this occasion the critique ‘manifests in form as well as theme’.204 The ‘snow’ that has ‘buried’ the ‘Stuyvesant’ monument establishes a sense of Cold War annihilation while the ‘subways’ that ‘charge on Third’205 incorporate a train symbolism much like Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’. Here, however, the journey is not into a  ‘A Shiver’, DC, p.5.  DC, p.15. 202  SS, p.215. 203  RLCP, p.117. 204  Michael Thurston, ‘Robert Lowell’s Monumental Vision: History, Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar American Lyric’, American Literary History, Vol. 12, No. 1/2 (Spring–Summer, 2000), p.92. 205  RLCP, p.117. 200 201

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Dante-­esque underworld; it is a journey through American political history which, like the train’s ‘wheels’ stuck in ‘ice’,206 has become jammed by the election of Republican war hero Eisenhower. Lowell links this election back to the earlier one of Ulysses S. Grant, another war hero president whose ‘mausoleum’ lives on in the American ‘heart’.207 Thurston notes the significance of Lowell’s choice to invoke the battle of Cold Harbor, where Grant ‘sent doomed charges’ to win the Civil War by ‘[outspending] the confederacy’208 in human lives. The image of Grant’s ‘sword’ now set in ‘the groove’ as ‘fixed’ as ‘stars’ demonstrates how his celebrated determination has been rendered stupidly defenceless by the Nuclear age (‘atoms, split apart’).209 Paradoxically, the sculpted weapon serves to undercut rather than reinforce any notions of Grant’s heroism, as the sword appears a brittle anachronism in the present era when murder is possible on the scale of millions instantaneously. In its criticism of Grant, Lowell’s ‘Inauguration Day’ exemplifies one of James E. Young’s key arguments about traditional monuments in his influential study of post-war German memorials: the actual consequence of a memorial’s unyielding fixedness in space is also its death over time: a fixed image created in one time and carried over into a new time suddenly appears archaic, strange, or irrelevant altogether.210

In highlighting this fixedness as the limitation of a statue intended to prop up an official history, Lowell’s sonnet utilises a similar methodology to the self-sabotaging monuments that Young terms ‘“counter-monuments”’: ‘brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being.’211 Unbound by physical limits, Lowell’s poem becomes a kind of non-site where a productive discourse can take place and for history to be seen in a new, revealing light. The poem’s critique of the past has personal implications for Lowell, too, as Life Studies represented the key breakthrough when he discarded the stricter forms  RLCP, p.117.  RLCP, p.117. 208  Thurston, ‘Robert Lowell’s Monumental Vision: History, Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar American Lyric’, p.91. 209  RLCP, p.117. 210  James E. Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1992, Vol. 18, No. 2, p.294. 211  Ibid., p.271. 206 207

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and dense allusion of his earlier poetry in favour of looser stanza structures. So, while the ‘split’, irregular sections of ‘Inauguration Day’ causes the sonnet to, rather appropriately, cave in on itself like a formerly grand landmark among the ruins of a blast, in another sense, the poem becomes a survivalist text that speaks to the poet’s power to remake out of history. In ‘District and Circle’ Heaney subverts expectations of the sonnet shape in the same way, virtually turning the poem into a visual representation of the bombed 7/7 train carriages that haunt beneath the poem’s surface. Richard Rankin Russell notes that though Heaney ‘never explicitly mentions the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005’, ‘District and Circle’ comes ‘in the wake of the triptych of September 11th poems’ and ‘silently mourns the absence of those 52 murdered victims who were killed by four homicide-bombers’.212 Throughout the sequence, flashes of the contemporary violence are glimpsed through Heaney’s lexical choices, as in ‘trigger’, ‘rumbled’, ‘staggered’, ‘succumbing’, ‘Blindsided’, and in the images of ‘iron on iron’ and of passengers ‘hurtled forward’.213 The effects of the contemporary bombings are also encoded into the poem’s frame. The first section establishes the sequence’s pattern-breaking method by partially resisting the sonnet shape, becoming a sonnet only depending on how its eighth line is read. The phrase ‘For Ourselves’ hangs on the page before the lower, indented phrase ‘As the music larked and capered’.214 Line ambiguity is reinforced by the rhyme scheme which, up until line eight, has been AABBCDC, thus the word ‘avoid’ becomes the first lineending to ‘avoid’ a full rhyme. If we choose to count the assonantal echo between ‘Ourselves’ and ‘avoid’, however, then the poem can be seen to follow the pattern AABBCDCDEFEFGG, thus bringing the total number of lines (or at least rhymes) to fourteen and making this section a complete sonnet. Throughout the sequence, Heaney toys with structure to provide many more disruptive moments. The first section is followed by an unambiguous fourteen-line unit where the word ‘resurrection’215 appears twice, with Heaney being correspondingly revitalised by ‘draughts’ of ‘cooler’ air in the poem’s narrative action; the third section regresses to thirteen lines and begins by retreating 212  Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p.194. 213  DC, pp.17–19. 214  DC, p.17. 215  DC, pp.17–18.

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‘Another level down’ to where the ‘succumbing’ crowd is ‘half straggleravelled’ and takes on a prey-like ‘herd-quiet’; the fourth section recovers to a full fourteen lines, with accompanying imagery of Heaney being ‘stayed’, ‘buoyed’, and ‘girded’216 before the poem’s concluding section, where he returns to an uncertain line total, similar to the opening section. In the last section, the broken link in the fourth line (‘And craning…’) is fully rhymed with the preceding line-ending (‘waning’),217 giving the severed line the rhyming power of a complete one. A similar status is given to the poem’s final word, ‘flicker-lit’, which is indented and essentially isolated from the rest of the poem. In order for the poem’s second section to be read as a sestet, this single word must be counted as a full line. Through these ploys, the final sonnet more strongly implies the relationship between form and external world that Heaney has been building from the poem’s beginning. The ‘growl / Of shutting doors’ and the images of the train ‘hurtled forward’ between ‘blasted weeping rock-walls’218 provide the strongest allusions yet to the 7/7 bombings. Indeed, the uneven sections and lineation of ‘District and Circle’ causes it to look a lot like a ‘blasted’ multiple-unit train. The ‘only relict’ of ‘all’219 to which the poet belongs, the sonnet, emblematic of all poetry, is made to feel startlingly fragile. In his next and final collection, Human Chain (2010), Heaney favours a twelve-line form Colm Tóibín describes as ‘a sonnet without the couplet’ that refuses ‘to close and conclude’.220 Though it is tempting to view the twelve-liner as the finale of Heaney’s sonnet experimentation, or the conclusion of Lowell’s advice to knock the sonnet into less regular shapes, Heaney may simply come to realise in Human Chain that the shorter form offers many of the advantages of the sonnet, such as the sense of inevitable foreclosure that leads to an answering poem, without the sonnet’s connotations of literary history and national tradition. Indeed, because of these trappings, it has been argued that ‘every modern sonnet becomes partly a sonnet about sonnets’.221 This heavy literary cargo is precisely why Heaney deploys the sonnet throughout District and Circle,  DC, p.18.  DC, p.19. 218  DC, p.19. 219  DC, p.19. 220  Colm Tóibín, ‘Human Chain by Seamus Heaney – review’, The Guardian, 21 August, 2010, web. 221  A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth, editors, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.3. 216 217

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and perhaps not in Human Chain, as the form’s literary force is in the former collection needed to press back against new external pressure. While it may be convenient for certain critical narratives to interpret the changes to Heaney’s sonnet as a shift from a self-professedly ‘Irish’ version of the form (‘landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore’)222 towards a Lowell-like and therefore more ‘American’ model in District and Circle, when America served not just as the place of his professional appointment but as the powerbase of the Heaney phenomenon, ‘District and Circle’ shows that the changes to Heaney’s conception of the sonnet is rooted in something deeper than ideas of national tradition. Heaney realises, as Lowell earlier did, that the sonnet’s jewel-like quality is not a feature to be resisted simply for the purposes of a cultural-political positioning; rather, he comes to see that the sonnet’s imaginative artificiality, like the eclogue, is an accepted element of its function. To return to the terms of ‘A Shiver’, the sonnet is the ‘testudo’223 within which the creative impulse shelters. It is in this sense that the sonnets of District and Circle build productively on the advancements of Electric Light, where Heaney uses the Virgilian eclogue in a similar deployment. Heaney defines the eclogue as ‘a kind of Crystal Palace, beautifully structured and strong because of inner relationships and symmetries’; it ‘asks us to see through it […] to regard it as both a revelation and an intervention […] depending upon how much reality you are ready to accommodate’.224 The sonnet in District and Circle operates in this manner too, but in the higher-stakes context of a world plunged into uncertain war. Heaney’s comments on the eclogue might also suggest his new perspective on Lowell’s late sonnet collections in his final phase: no longer attempts to ‘cage’ reality in an ‘arbitrary fourteen-line template’,225 as he termed them earlier, Lowell’s sonnet mania is another kind of imaginative freedom against the threatening actual, a cause that the Heaney of District and Circle may be more able to understand. In Lowell’s case these threats were also internal, as he continued to battle mental illness in the final years of his life when he composed hundreds of blank sonnets.226 Under these pressures, the sonnet form becomes emblematic of  FW, p.29.  DC, p.5. 224  Heaney, “‘In Extremis’”, pp.6–7. 225  ‘Full Face’, P, p.222. 226  Heaney notes in his critical writings that it ‘has been suggested that the drug prescribed for his illness contributed to the change of style which became evident in Lowell’s 1969 volume, the aptly entitled Notebook 1967–68’ where the reader was presented with ‘a massive 222 223

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what redeems us: our ability to reimagine. Perhaps this is why, as Miłosz notes, on the scale of what is valued most in times of crisis, first place is ‘not always bread; often it is the word.’227 Miłosz continues: The poetic act changes with the amount of background reality embraced by the poet’s consciousness. In our century that background is, in my opinion, related to the fragility of those things we call civilization or culture. What surrounds us, here and now, is not guaranteed. It could just as well not exist—and so man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins.228

Miłosz suggests that the essential function of much modern verse is to underwrite the provisional nature of our existence and the uncertainty of history. For Heaney and Lowell, the sonnet proves to be the shape that most effectively crystallises the fragility of form while at the same time demonstrating our ability to reinvent old structures. It is intriguing that Lowell is not among the extensive cast of poets to receive a tribute or mention in District and Circle. While he was composing Field Work and Lowell’s influence on his work was at its most intense, Heaney told O’Driscoll that he considered writing a volume entirely of sonnets;229 composed mostly of fourteen-line poems, District and Circle comes closest of all Heaney’s collections to achieving this status. The fact that it does so without mention of Lowell speaks to Heaney’s mixed feelings and self-consciousness regarding Lowell’s influence later in his career. In Stepping Stones, he admits he is not surprised that the critical tide turned against Lowell since Lowell ‘was on the winning side from the start’, he was a ‘Boston Brahmin, friend of Eliot, part of the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic’.230 Yet in the global crises of District and Circle there is a sense in which Heaney is lamenting the absence of a figure like Lowell, whose cultural ‘authority’231 and ability to bully ‘out / hearthammering blank sonnets’232 has never been so desperately needed, nor accumulation of unrhymed sonnets’. Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell’, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, edited by Ian Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.314. 227  Czesław Miłosz, ‘Ruins and Poetry’, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1981–82 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), p.63. 228  Ibid., p.97. 229  O’Driscoll, ‘In the Mid-Course of His Life’, p.8. 230  SS, p.280. 231  SS, p.273. 232  ‘Elegy’, FW, p.26.

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perhaps so badly misunderstood. Skirting Lowell’s dubious edges, in his eulogy Heaney states that when a cherished person dies, one has the opportunity to ‘assume into our own life values which we admired in his, and thereby to conserve his unique energy.’233 Heaney’s later writing is lacking in explicit tributes for Lowell because the writing itself has become the method of conservation. Once the most visible of Heaney’s influences, in District and Circle Lowell’s example is fully assumed, fully masked.

v Heaney’s final book, Human Chain, mirrors the two preceding volumes— Electric Light and District and Circle—by heavily favouring a single form, the twelve-line stanza, and invoking classical poetry extensively. These two features work productively towards the wintry note that critics praised in early assessments of the collection. In his influential review, Tóibín argues that the twelve-line stanza ‘offers a sort of looseness, a buoyancy, a refusal to close and conclude; it means that the endings of these poems can have a particular pathos’.234 Aside from this effect, the twelve-line stanza has a coded significance in the volume, as there are twelve books in Virgil’s Aeneid and Human Chain represents Heaney’s twelfth Faber book of original poetry. This symmetry gives a certain visionary quality to Tom Paulin’s earlier comment that Virgil’s Aeneid was ‘a seminal and founding text’235 for Heaney, but it is also notable that twelve is generally a significant number in timekeeping and measurement. The twelve-line frame is thus an apt form for poems in which Heaney meditates on the deaths of friends and on his own declining health following a stroke in August 2006. Heaney confronts loss and illness directly in several of the volume’s poems, and processes mortality through a focus on particular images—often present in poems from much earlier volumes—that he shares with Bishop, indicating her continued significance to him in this final phase. Moreover, Bishop reworks some of these same shared images in her final collection Geography III (1976), published just three years prior to her own death of a cerebral aneurysm at the age of 68. In Human Chain, Heaney, like Bishop, uses painting and kite imagery to explore the limits of perception and to manage his anxiety about death. Notably, the volume’s Bishop-like  Heaney, ‘On Robert Lowell’, The New York Review of Books, 9 February, 1978, web.  Tóibín, ‘Human Chain by Seamus Heaney – review’, web. 235  Quoted in SS, p.389. 233 234

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poems indicate that Heaney has gained an increased appreciation for the indeterminacy principle of Bishop’s verse. In this final phase, when facing his own mortality, Heaney embraces Bishopesque uncertainty to a new degree. ‘A Kite for Aibhín’, the volume’s final poem, plays an important role in the collection’s theme of mortality and has a strong link to Bishop. Heaney had used the kite image much earlier in the poem ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’ from Station Island (1984), which he sent to Bishop in 1979 along with a batch of other unpublished poems, including his tribute to Bishop, ‘A Hank of Wool’. As discussed in the previous chapter, in the cover letter Heaney tells Bishop that he feels the tribute poem ‘has one or two images which we probably share’–236 several of the other poems he sent have what could be described as shared images. In Stepping Stones, Heaney recalls that Bishop ‘liked specific bits of the poems’ he sent her, ‘such as a line about “the deer of poetry” standing “in pools of lucent sound”’237 from ‘A Deer in Glanmore’, later published as ‘A Migration’. Heaney may have hoped this particular poem would resonate with Bishop because of its stylistic similarity to ‘The Moose’, where the huge animal steps ‘out of / the impenetrable wood’ and ‘looms’238 in the road, mesmerising the bus passengers. Heaney’s ‘A Deer in Glanmore’ shares many stylistic features with Bishop’s, using the same six-line stanza shape and a ‘lyric wood’239 setting. Though Bishop’s poem is much longer, and her animal is, of course, rendered in far greater, literal detail, it too, in a sense, stands ‘in pools of lucent sound’ as the bus fills with the passengers’ ‘whispers’, even that of ‘the quiet driver’ who rolls ‘his r’s’.240 Heaney would also have appreciated the sense in which Bishop’s poem writes back to Frost’s ‘Two Look at Two’, where the ‘clouded eyes’241 of the mysterious animals hold the gazers’ attention before the final ‘spell-breaking’242 and the deer exit the scene. 236  Listed as ‘f. 5.1 Heaney, Seamus, 1979 (1 letter, 1 postcard)’ in the Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives & Special Collections Library, Vassar College. 237  SS, p.278. 238  EBP, p.191. 239  Folder 84.5 in Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives & Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Before reworking the poem for Station Island, Heaney published ‘A Deer in Glanmore’ in London Review of Books, 25 October 1979, web. 240  EBP, p.192. 241  RFCP, p.229. 242  RFCP, p.230.

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Clearly, Heaney is summoning significant earlier experiences in Human Chain. There is even a rare evocation of the Harvard setting that he shared with Bishop in ‘Canopy’, while ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ recalls the earlier poem ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’. Like ‘A Deer in Glanmore’, his choice to send this kite poem to her again reflects his familiarity with her work, as Bishop uses images of artwork and floating objects to great effect throughout her poetry. In her study of Bishop’s use of visual art, Peggy Samuels observes that often in Bishop’s work, arguing that ‘natural and manmade objects float, ascend, descend, cross, recede, unfurl, lift, open, threaten or give a sense of weight or weightlessness to a lyric speaker who responds discursively and emotionally’.243 This poetic trait is clearly exhibited by Bishop in ‘The Armadillo’—the poem Heaney references in ‘The Skunk’—when one of the ‘illegal fire balloons’ rises until its ‘up against the sky’. Bishop continues to watch the climbing object, observing, ‘With a wind, / they flare and falter, wobble and toss’.244 In this dramatic collision of the manmade and the natural, the rising lantern enters a synergistic relationship with the imagination of the observer, whose verbs multiply in increasingly self-invigorated language as the ‘rising’ balloon floats higher. Much like ‘The Monument’ (where the word ‘or’ is used fourteen times), Bishop’s recurring ‘or’ in ‘The Armadillo’ is additive rather than oppositional, opening rather than closing routes to meaning with each new deployment. The same principle is at work in ‘A Cold Spring’ where ‘fireflies / begin to rise: / up, then down, then up again’ like ‘the bubbles in champagne’, forming a temporary spectacle for the speaker ‘throughout the summer’.245 In ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’, Heaney echoes these descriptions as the kite climbs higher in an airy scene that is clearly analogous with the poetic act: My friend says that the human soul is about the weight of a snipe, yet the soul at anchor there[.]246

243  Peggy Samuels, ‘Bishop and Visual Art’, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.176. 244  EBP, p.101. 245  EBP, p.56. Bishop also uses a ‘kite’ image in her unpublished poem ‘Suicide of a Moderate Dictator’ where she remembers a ‘rainbow steadily hung’ in the sky, EBP, p.299. 246  SI, p.44.

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After these images, Heaney envisions the kite plunging from the air ‘into the wood’, much like Bishop’s speaker in ‘The Armadillo’ who anticipates danger, or the speaker of ‘A Cold Spring’ whose observations are imbued with the knowledge that the summer spectacle is of finite duration. Kite imagery, or more specifically a denied kite image, plays an important role in Bishop’s late poem ‘The End of March’. Walking along a beach towards her ‘crypto-dream-house’, Bishop discovers ‘A Kite string?—But no kite.’247 Jonathan Ellis notes that Bishop described ‘The End of March’ as her own ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, implying that the poem is set not in a reality, but in a longed-for world.248 As its title suggests, ‘The End of March’ explores multiple losses and endings, as the ‘cold and windy’ seascape reveals ‘withdrawn’ wilderness and the ‘shrunken’249 ocean. Even Bishop’s ‘proto-dream-house’, a clear objective correlative where she wants to do ‘nothing’, is rendered ‘dubious’ and ‘boarded up’.250 Retracing her steps ‘On the way back’ along the beach, Bishop returns to the site where she had seen ‘dog-prints’ but no dog, and a kite string but ‘no kite’, and imagines the sun as a lion ‘who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.’251 The imagined kite-batting that concludes the poem is, like the unlived-in dream house, an offstage object that can only be imagined by the poet who is left to wonder at the evidence of absence around her. In denying the reader the airy imagery that characterises many of her earlier poems, ‘The End of March’ ends in a deliberate recourse to ‘nothing’ and, in doing so, captures, in a different way, the uncontainable nature of experience. Heaney’s ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ concludes on a similar note to ‘The End of March’, with the kite breaking free and taking off into a mysterious elsewhere. Noting how Heaney’s ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ reworks the images of its source, ‘L’Aquilone’ by Giovanni Pascoli, Michael Parker describes Heaney’s version as ‘[o]ne of the most accomplished poems in the collection’ that ‘bears witness to Heaney’s mastery of form, metaphor, rhythm,

 EBM, p.199.  Jonathan Ellis, ‘Elizabeth Bishop in Ireland: From Seamus Heaney to Colm Tóibín’, Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p.309. 249  EBM, p.199. 250  EBM, pp.199–200. 251  EBM, p.200. 247 248

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and musical effects, which does full justice to Pascoli’s original.’252 Heaney explains in introductory comments to his first interpretation of the original in English, reproduced by Griselda, that he translated the poem for his friend Mary Kelleher and that the original text had been given to him by Professor Gabriella Morisco when he was in Italy, where he received an honorary degree from the University of Urbino.253 Morisco, Heaney recalls, was sensitive to the ‘Italian-Irish connections’ in ‘L’Aquilone’, and ‘knew that Yeats’s phrase [“Urbino’s windy hill”] lurked in the Italian text and knew moreover that I had written my own kite poem (“A Kite for Michael and Christopher”)’.254 The original ‘L’Aquilone’, translated by Heaney, offers an especially moving depiction of childhood and mortality. In its description of a ‘very pale’ figure, the ‘boy at play’ with ‘a full / Head of blond hair’ who has gone ‘down into the clay’,255 the poem recalls the images of Heaney’s brother, Christopher, from ‘Mid-Term Break’. Heaney explained to O’Driscoll that the tragic loss of his young brother led him to be ‘susceptible’ to elegies for ‘dead children’,256 hence his early fondness for John Crowe Ransom’s poetry. In ‘A Kite for Aibhín’, however, there is no death of a child; rather, Heaney emphasises his own age by casting himself in the same role of kite instructor as his earlier poem but, this time, to his grandchild. An elegiac tone is struck from the opening tercet, when ‘Air from another life’ becomes ‘Pale blue’ and ‘heavenly’ to support the ‘white wing’ of the ‘kite’.257 Standing ‘opposite / Anahorish Hill’ where he had attended primary school, Heaney’s kite takes off in a Bishop-like dazzle of verbs (‘hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew’).258 The final tercet describes the ‘heart’ of the flier in one long unpunctuated sentence ‘Until’ the ‘string breaks’ and, in contrast to his earlier poem where the kite plunges 252   Michael Parker, ‘“Renewed, transfigured, in another pattern”: Metaphor and Displacement in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain’, “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”, p.168. 253  See Gabriella Morisco, ‘Two Poets and a Kite: Heaney and Pascoli’, Linguæ & – Journal of Modern Languages ​​and Cultures, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2013, pp.35–45. 254  Heaney, ‘The Kite’, Griselda, web. NB ‘Heaney read his translation on April 3 this year [2012] in the Stabat Mater room at the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna, on the occasion of the international conference “Pastures in the imaginary of Italians”’. 255  Heaney, ‘From The Kite’, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, An Anthology, edited by Geoffrey Brock (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012), pp.15–17. 256  SS, p.427. 257  HC, p.85. 258  HC, p.85.

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earthward, ‘The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.’259 Like ‘The End of March’, there are two emotions played against each other here: the wonderment of the speaker gazing into the mysterious element, and the sorrow redolent in the image of the poet losing his grip on the actual, represented by the ‘Unspooling’ kite string. Both feelings harmonise each other in the final ‘windfall’ which, in a single word, encapsulates the twin sensations of gratitude and loss that the thought of mortality inspires throughout the volume. The same effect is achieved by Bishop’s untethered kite, which implies loss but also suggests that the kite might fly on. It is apt, then, that both ‘The End of March’ and ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ have Yeatsian connections, since the lost kites in both poems approximate to Yeats’s vanishing swans that will ‘Delight men’s eyes’260 in an elsewhere denied to the aging poet in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. In all three poems, the recourse to absence underlines the predicament of the poet who, having lived a life defined by the imaginary, must now conceive of imagination’s end from within it. Put another way, consciousness cannot process its own termination, so instead Heaney, like other poets before him, offers a self-­terminating image. As Philip Larkin puts it, it is the non-event of death—the sense in which it cannot be experienced—that the poet most fears: it is ‘The anaesthetic from which none come round.’261 The emotive open-endedness that characterises ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ is equally pronounced in Heaney’s late poems about paintings, which provide another major link to Bishop in this last phase of his career. Bishop’s ekphrastic tendency is well noted; in one of the earliest studies of her work, Tom Travisano observes that for Bishop the ‘link between memory and art is essential’, and that ‘art can renew the ordinary, opposing the destruction of time.’262 Samuels has noted that Bishop’s poetry evolved in response to the aesthetic debates she read about in art periodicals.263 Like Travisano, Samuels argues that for Bishop ‘visual art served as a stimulus […] a means of skirting dead ends or limitations’.264 Artwork functions in the same way in Human Chain’s ‘Death of a Painter’ and ‘Loughanure’,  HC, p.85.  W. B. Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, W. B. Yeats Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Webb (London: Penguin, 1991), p.85. 261  Philip Larkin, ‘Aubade’, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p.190. 262  Thomas J.  Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p.192. 263  Samuels, ‘Bishop and Visual Art’, p.169. 264  Ibid. 259 260

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and in Heaney’s last completed poem ‘Banks of a Canal’, finished just ten days before he died and published as part of a collection celebrating 150 years of the National Gallery of Ireland. The strategy of exceeding boundaries by paradoxically focusing on the limits of an object is used by Bishop in some of her earliest poems, such as ‘The Map’, where she deconstructs the ‘the map-makers’ colors’,265 and ‘The Monument’, where the ‘artifact / of wood’ represents the ‘beginning of a painting’266 and leads her into deeper contemplation of art’s endurance. In the same volume, North & South, she analyses the amateur efforts of her ‘great-uncle’ who produced a painting ‘before he became a schoolteacher’267 in ‘Large Bad Picture’. Though it is a well-known poem in the Bishop pantheon, ‘Large Bad Picture’ is somewhat overshadowed by the later eksphratic poems ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ and ‘Poem’. Indeed, Lloyd Schwartz argues ‘[r]eaders generally agree that the last lines of “Poem”’, which reveal Bishop’s increased consciousness of ‘her own mortality’, are among her ‘most poignant.’268 In all three of these poems, an interior world is slowly revealed as Bishop’s speakers each focus on the physical aspects of the painting. Like Bishop, Heaney’s tendency towards ekphrasis is a key feature of his achievement. Heaney’s ‘Bogland’, where he discovers an Irish political consciousness through depictions of the landscape, is dedicated to painter T. P. Flanagan, while the dark portraits of bog bodies that brought Heaney to international attention in the 1970s famously grew out of the images contained in Peter Glob’s The Bog People (1969). The eksphratic poems of Human Chain, however, utilise many new, Bishop-like tropes. In ‘Death of a Painter’, dedicated to Nancy Wynne Jones, Heaney uses Bishop’s strategy of turning the painting over in the speaker’s mind repeatedly, allowing the frozen image to become animated through a series of modifications. The poem’s self-revising method evokes Bishop’s process of a mind thinking and is achieved by prefixing each new addition with ‘Not’, as in the opening line: ‘Not a tent of blue but a peek of gold’.269 Heaney uses the device four times in the twelve-line poem in the phrases ‘not  EBP, p.5.  EBP, pp.26–27. 267  EBP, p.13. 268  Lloyd Schwartz, ‘Back to Boston: Geography III and Other Late Poems’, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.146. 269  EBP, p.60. 265 266

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Cézanne’, then ‘not Hardy’, and finally ‘not a butterfly but Jonah entering / The whale’s mouth’.270 The effect is similar to the one achieved by the ‘or’ of ‘The Monument’ or the intense descriptive method of ‘The Fish’, where Bishop self-reflexively describes the ‘the tipping / of an object toward the light’,271 a phrase which is a concise summation of Heaney’s method in ‘Death of a Painter’. Heaney imagines Jones ‘gazing’ from ‘her coign of vantage in the studio’272 and, in doing so, effectively merges the ‘two looks’273 of painter and poet, to borrow the terms of ‘Poem’. Indeed, in ‘Loughanure’, ‘life and the memory of it’ are touchingly ‘compressed’274 into the poem’s lines which describe the painter as much as the artwork. Like Bishop, Heaney uses the physical qualities of the ‘canvas’275 as an access point to the imaginative world beyond. Recalling the ‘semi-translucent’276 cliffs in ‘Large Bad Picture’, the ‘specks of birds’277 in ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations’, or the ‘dab’278 of the barn in ‘Poem’, we see the ash-white ‘flecks on the horizon line’279 of Colin Middleton’s painting, through the observer’s eyes, before he contemplates the ‘afterlife’.280 As ‘Poem’ meditates on the value of a painting that ‘never earned any money in its life’281 and considers the effects of time on the remembered landscape ‘(it must have changed a lot)’,282 Heaney tells us in ‘Loughanure’ that Middleton’s ‘painting’ was ‘thirty guineas / Forty-odd years ago’283 but now, as the poet covers ‘those few miles / In almost as few minutes’284 in modern road-networked Ireland, the painting of Loughanure—or ‘the memory of it’—285 takes on far greater significance.  EBP, p.60.  EBP, p.44. 272  EBP, p.60. 273  EBP, p.197. 274  EBP, p.197. 275  HC, p.61. 276  EBP, p.13. 277  EBP, p.57. 278  EBP, p.196. 279  HC, p.61, 280  HC, p.62. 281  EBP, p.196. 282  EBP, p.197. 283  HC, p. 61. 284  HC, p.65. 285  EBP, p.197. 270 271

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Many of these Bishop-like mannerisms, and particularly the devices of ‘Poem’, are clear to see in Heaney’s final poem, ‘Banks of a Canal’, a sonnet written in response to Gustave Caillebotte’s painting of the same name: Say ‘canal’ and there’s that final vowel Towing silence with it, slowing time To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still.286

Echoing Bishop’s revelation of her ‘words’ becoming ‘visible’287 in ‘Objects and Apparitions’ (her late poem for the artist Joseph Cornell), Heaney’s experience of the artwork leads him through the ‘final vowel’ of the word ‘canal’ and into the landscape itself. Once inside the world of the painting he feels the same shock of recognition as Bishop in ‘Poem’ (‘Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!’)288 when he realises: ‘I know that clay, the damp and dirt of it’. Though Bishop’s recognition in ‘Poem’ is charged with the trauma of her unwilling childhood relocation away from Nova Scotia to Worcester, Massachusetts, Heaney’s identification with the ‘damp and dirt’ of ‘ploughland’ is also touching, if less personally painful, as it effectively transplants the rugged landscapes of Heaney’s first verses into what would become his final poem. Heaney concludes the sonnet not inside the painting but ‘beyond’289 it, allowing himself to ‘stray’ into the unknown as he did at the end of ‘A Kite of Aibhín’. In these poems of painting and air-climbing, Heaney, like Bishop, is able to transform the physical world into a permeable membrane through which the poet can enter a new ‘horizon’290 of consciousness. Considering Bishop’s influence on Heaney’s late poetry alongside that of Frost and Lowell, it is clear that another profound gestation has occurred. The two air-climbs of ‘The Gravel Walks’ and ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ demonstrate Heaney’s new approach in his final poetry to the ‘concrete’291 world. In the former poem, the air-walk is a carefully timed and 286  Published in Alison Flood, ‘Seamus Heaney’s last poem published in Irish gallery’s anthology’, The Guardian, 3 October 2014, web. Collected in Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art, edited by Janet McLean (London: Thames and Hudson Limited, 2014). 287  EBP, p.202. 288  EBP, p.196. 289  Ibid. 290  Ibid. 291  CP, p.450.

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triumphant stylistic remaking; in the latter it is a poignant acceptance of the uncontrollable. This change can be demonstrated by comparing two further instances of Bishop’s impact on Heaney’s poetry. Whereas in the earlier phase Bishop’s ‘Sestina’ inspired Heaney to master the sestina’s trapdoor line-endings in ‘Two Lorries’, his ekphrastic method in Human Chain is more consonant with Bishop’s work, indicating a more sensitive reading of her poetry. For Heaney in his final phase, the physical brushstrokes which outlast the painter are not limits to be mastered like the repetitions of the sestina; rather, they evidence human mortality and give the poet the perspective necessary to contemplate his own. With great pathos, Heaney realises in Human Chain that our ability to perceive our creatureliness is the ‘little that we get for free’,292 the ‘Windfall’293 that comes with age. Ultimately, in Bishop’s achievement lies the principle to which Heaney devotes himself in his final poems: in Pindar’s phrase, ‘do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.’294

 ‘Poem’, EBP, p.197.  ‘A Kite for Aibhín’, HC, p. 294  Pindar, Pythian III, quoted in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien and with an Introduction by James Wood (London: Penguin Books, 2000), preface. 292 293

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

This study has analysed the impact of the American poets most significant to Heaney’s achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career. Undoubtedly, Heaney was attracted to formally restrained American poets rather than the US experimentalists: in Lowell’s terms the ‘cooked’, rather than the ‘raw’.1 This resistance to radical experimentalism also permeates Heaney’s commentary about those US writers who, though not claimed influences on his poetry, feature in his critical writings and interviews. One such notable figure is John Ashbery, who was at one stage the focal point of Heaney’s ambivalence for the contemporary American poetic landscape. When asked by O’Driscoll about his famous 1985 description of Ashbery’s poetry as ‘a centrally heated daydream’ that ‘is also sorrowful, it knows it’s inadequate’,2 Heaney responds, ‘I wasn’t trying to demean him, just pointing out that he wasn’t prepared to deliver jeremiads’;3 when asked ‘[d]id you struggle with Ashbery […] if only because your students admired him greatly’,4 he responds, ‘I could make nothing of it, nor did I  Robert Lowell, ‘Robert Lowell accepts the 1960 National Book Award in Poetry for Life Studies’, November 1960, web. 2  ‘Poetry and Politics: A Conversation between Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney Conducted by Fintan O’Toole’, Magill, November 1985, web. 3  SS, p.282. 4  SS, p.281 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7_7

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make much of an effort.’5 As this final comment suggests, there is often a hint of frustration in Heaney’s commentary about Ashbery, and a sense in which he sees Ashbery’s verse as symptomatic of the diminished cultural authority of the poet in post-war America. In his 1988 interview with Randy Brandes, for instance, Heaney remarks ‘I understand more, now that I have been in America for 5 or 6 years, [Ashbery’s] popularity’; ‘he registers a bemused, disappointed but untragic response to the evacuation of meaning from most people’s lives.’6 This concern with changing fashions and the diminished role of poetry in society is also at the root of Heaney’s 1981 discussion of James Wright in which he identifies a contagion of ‘disappointment’ and sense of ‘the inadequacy of art’.7 For Heaney, Wright lacks ‘trust in poetry’s power’, something which is indicated by his ‘abandonment of traditional forms’; he has been ‘conquered by the weight of the intractable contemporary industrial reality, conquered into being content’8 and, subsequently, his poetry ‘assents to rather than resists the idea that poetry is no longer an active force in the life of a society.’9 Though both Wright and Ashbery are ‘inadequate’ in this final sense, the latter escapes such sustained criticism because he is thought of by Heaney as, at least, a competent craftsman who can ably toy with ‘all kinds of traditional sublimities’10 in a poetry at once of ‘galleon-like progress’ and ‘paper boat mockery.’11 Heaney’s sense, then, of Ashbery as inadequate is related to Heaney’s own particular formalism. As John Dennison observes, Heaney’s ‘idea of adequacy, of poetry as an ameliorative and restorative response to—adequation of—the inimical reality of life in the public domain’ is deeply entangled with the centrality of poetic form, the thing which, in Heaney’s words, ‘is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit’.12 Because of his distrust of Heaneyesque concepts of

 SS, p.282.  Randy Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, No. 80, 1988, p.16. 7  Heaney, ‘Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry’, Critical Inquiry Vol. 7 No. 4, Summer 1981, p.645. 8  Ibid., p.647. 9  Ibid., p.648. 10  SS, p.196. 11  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, p.16. 12  CP, p.467. 5 6

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‘adequation’13 and his apparent refusal to differentiate between language and the external world, Ashbery remains for Heaney—despite his popularity—merely a barometer who ‘registers an evacuation of meaning’ in a verse that can only be a ‘response’14 or become ‘equal to’15 the external: this is not the adequation of reality that should foreground every legitimate poetic effort in Heaney’s view. Heaney’s sense that an ideal poetry ‘holds its own’16 against reality, and is not just a response to it, is ironically what brings him to a late recognition of the more radical achievements of Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson. In ‘Crediting Poetry’, Heaney explains that due to the Northern Irish ‘vigilance and realism’ he ‘internalized’, he ‘went for years half-avoiding and half-resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke’.17 In contrast to his longstanding complaints about Ashbery, when Heaney’s prose and interview comments on Stevens are compiled, there emerges a picture of opening up to Stevens gradually. In 1988 Heaney admitted that he is ‘awed’ but made ‘helpless’18 by the ungraspable nature of Stevens; that he ‘cannot see the poetry defined’ as he can see ‘Frost defined against a sky or landscape.’19 By the time of his Oxford lectures, however, Stevens is invoked in the first sentence of the title lecture. Where Stevens was a peripheral figure for Heaney, he is now central, a fact that is evidenced by a use of ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ in the opening paragraphs of ‘The Redress of Poetry’, which establish the volume’s key points regarding the place of poetry in society. Though Heaney installs himself as an adjudicator importantly between Stevens and an imagined ‘disaffected heckler’ who is ‘crying out against the mystification of art’,20 he aligns himself with Stevens neatly during one of the most significant passages in

13  John Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p.4. 14  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, p.16. Added emphasis. 15  Heaney, ‘Threshold and Floor’, Metre, Vol. 7, No. 8, Spring–Summer 2000, p.267. Added emphasis. 16  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, p.21. 17  CP, p.451. 18  Ibid., p.15. 19  Ibid., p.16. 20  ‘The Redress of Poetry, R, p.1.

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the volume, when writer and disaffected citizen become one, pressing ‘back against the pressure of reality.’21 In this image of a place ‘beyond confusion’, Stevens is included in a critical mosaic comprised of Yeats, Frost, and Hardy in an instance of what Neil Corcoran once termed Heaney’s ‘high powers of absorption and response’.22 There are some intriguing mentions of Stevens in Stepping Stones, too. In a discussion of his friendship with Helen Vendler, Heaney remarks that she ‘doesn’t get as much from Robert Frost […] whereas I have learned from her to pay a lot more attention to Wallace Stevens.’23 Elsewhere in his conversations with O’Driscoll, Heaney considers the terms under which he learned to appreciate Stevens, claiming ‘the old antithesis between intellect and imagination, reason and feeling’ simply ‘doesn’t come into it’; Stevens has both ‘gorgeous display’ and ‘intellectual hardness’.24 These are terms in which he might finally want his own late poetics to be understood. In a similar way, Heaney opens himself to Dickinson’s achievement as he grows more assured of his own critical principles. In contrast to the steady increase in his acknowledgement of Stevens, Dickinson, aside from a brief mention in a 1976 essay on Stevie Smith, is relatively absent from Heaney’s criticism and interviews until the 1990s.25 In ‘Dylan the Durable?’ Heaney argues that it is a ‘veteran knowledge […] gathered to a phonetic and rhythmic head’ that makes Dickinson’s poetry ‘devastating as well as endearing’.26 In his Nobel speech, where he reflects that he had credited ‘insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson’,27 he paraphrases Dickinson in explication of McLeish, crediting, through a use of both writers, ‘poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant’.28

 ‘Frontiers of Writing’, R, p.190.  Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p.226. 23  SS, p.348. 24  SS, pp.384–85. 25  Heaney writes that Smith’s poems ‘miss the absolute intensity required by Emily Dickinson’s definition: when you read them, you don’t feel that the top of your head has been taken off. Rather, you have been persuaded to keep your head at all costs.’ ‘A Memorable Voice’, P, p.201. 26  ‘Dylan the Durable?’, R, p.135. 27  CP, p.451. 28  CP, p.454. 21 22

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Dickinson’s ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’,29 like Frost’s ‘stay against confusion’30 or Stevens’s ‘violence from within’,31 is a definition of poetry that encapsulates the sense in which it is for Heaney ‘both cogent and corrective’,32 the basis of its civic function. In the closing paragraphs of ‘Crediting Poetry’, Heaney praises Dickinson’s ‘extreme’ pursuit of this ‘truthfulness’33 during a discussion of poetry’s adequacy, exposing the nature of the affinity he imagines between them. Though Dickinson was no less radical than Whitman, her obliquity, the volume of her output, and her technical innovations can, unlike Ashbery’s somersaults, Snyder’s fragmented lineation, or Bly’s deep images, be understood straightforwardly as adequating tools. Like Stevens’s ‘oil-on-water’34 illusions, Dickinson’s ‘forked lightnings and fissures of association’35 contribute to poetry’s capacity—indeed its duty—to be more than simply a response to the external world.

ii Today, Heaney’s achievement is perceived as monumental and yet accessible to general readers. In this intriguing duality, Heaney continues to mirror Frost, his ‘favorite poet’36 and a hugely significant influence on his early poetics. As Blake Morrison has noted, Heaney has reached a wide readership by allowing, like Frost, a ‘simplified’37 version of his work and image to persist, especially in America. With characteristic wit, Frost envisioned the kind of success he would later enjoy in correspondence with a friend early in his career:

29  ‘1263: Tell all the truth but tell it slant’, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), p.1089. 30  Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.132. 31  Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, The Necessary Angel (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p.36. 32  CP, p.454. 33  CP, p.466. 34  Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, p.15. 35  CP, p.451. 36  Helen Vendler, “Second Thoughts & Coda: Tell the truth. Do not be afraid.’, Irish Pages Vol. 8, No. 2, 2014, p.15. 37  Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), p.12.

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There is one qualifying fact always to bear in mind: there is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it—don’t you doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.38

Though it is unlikely a young Heaney could have imagined the success he would later achieve, it is fair to say that he shared Frost’s sense of poetry as a form of labour that could bring rewards if worked at steadily over time. Indeed, the ‘qualifying fact’ Frost begins with here brings to mind the ‘fact’ that ‘is the sweetest dream that labor knows’ from ‘Mowing’, where ‘the hay’, like the poem, is left ‘to make’.39 Heaney’s labourer-like devotion to his craft was highlighted in the tributes which appeared following his death in 2013. In a special tribute edition of the Irish Pages, John Montague commented that Heaney ‘did his work’, adding that a ‘gift and the fulfilment of its promise, the rounding out of a career, is a rare thing, but Seamus achieved it.’40 Again, this ‘rounding out’ Montague describes is equally true for Frost, who concluded his long career with a famous appearance at JFK’s 1961 inauguration ceremony. Yet between Frost and Heaney there are a number of intriguing divergences. While Frost’s poetry was much more internationally minded than his readers may have supposed (especially in comparison to fellow modern poets such as his ‘quasi-friend Pound’), Heaney’s poetry, as we have seen throughout this study, is less hybrid than his critics and admirers might have imagined, especially given his long residencies in the US when he was exposed to a wide range of American poetry. Nonetheless, the interplay between the local and the global that marked Heaney’s career has become the defining characteristic of his legacy. In the months and years immediately following his death, there was a sense of homecoming in Ireland as the Heaney achievement was celebrated, and 38  Frost, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited Lawrence Thompson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p.98. 39  RFCP, p.17. 40  John Montague, ‘Mystic of the Ordinary: Doing his Work’, Irish Pages, Vol. 8, No. 2, Heaney (2014), p.111.

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perhaps reconciled, through a number of events and publications. To coincide with what would have been his 75th birthday, Queen’s University staged ‘Seamus Heaney: A Conference and Commemoration’, a high-­ profile event that attracted speakers from around the globe. Poignantly illustrating the twin gravities of Northern Ireland and America which exerted their force in various ways over his career, Heaney had been scheduled to appear at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington the same week as the Queen’s event.41 Ciaran Carson, former Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s, remarked of the Heaney commemoration that ‘Queen’s University is remembering one of its own’, while Belfast poet laureate Sínead Morrissey described the event as an assessment of Heaney’s ‘legacy and the lines of influence running into future generations.’42 Writing in a tribute edition of The Irish Review, Morrissey reflected that, of all the readings at the event, she found Paul Muldoon’s to be the most moving, in particular for how the lines of Heaney’s poem ‘Follower’ were transformed by the occasion as Muldoon read them: ‘But today / It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.’43 Belfast poet and former student of Heaney’s Medbh McGuckian encapsulates much of this same sense of mourning and return in ‘Night Journey of the Solar Bark’, one of three dedicated poems by McGuckian published in the same edition of The Irish Review, where she writes: ‘they bury him / In the soil from which he has sprung.’44 In the many tributes for Heaney by fellow writers that emerged in Ireland following his death, certain other themes emerged. Fintan O’Toole, in his own reflective piece, argues that great poets such as Heaney ‘speak for themselves but they also create the voices through which something beyond them finds articulation.’45 For O’Toole, Heaney’s legacy articulates the reality that ‘Ireland is a culture before it is an economy’; that ‘we are not simply a credit rating or an economy but a history and a 41  Peter Kissel, ‘Seamus Heaney’s worldwide impact celebrated during major international poetry conference in Belfast’, Embassy of Ireland, USA, April 29, 2014, web. 42  ‘Seamus Heaney Remembered at Queen’s’, web. 43  See Sinead Morrissey, ‘“And Fostered Me and Sent Me Out’: Muldoon Reading Heaney”’, The Irish Review (Cork) Winter-Spring 2014/2015, No. 49/50, Seamus Heaney, pp.137–40. 44  Medbh McGuckian, ‘Three Poems’, The Irish Review (Cork), Winter-Spring 2014/2015, No. 49/50, Seamus Heaney, p.148. 45  Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Great Citizen: It will play on in our heads’, Irish Pages, Vol. 8, No. 2, Heaney (2014), p.104.

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culture, a human population rather than a statistical phenomenon.’46 This feeling that Heaney stood for the unquantifiable value of poetry itself is shared by Leontia Flynn, who argues contrary to the idea that the Heaney inheritance will be a conservative one. For Flynn, Heaney’s unwavering faith in ‘poetry’s freedom’47 today, ‘when almost everything is for sale, including university degree subjects’, makes his achievement uniquely ‘radical.’48 Flynn probably speaks for many writers of her generation when she admits that Heaney was ‘too big, too famous and too much identified as a Northern Ireland spokesperson’ for her to take him ‘on board’49 when she first encountered him as a young writer herself. It was ‘easier’ to identify with McGuckian and Muldoon, ‘who seemed sceptical about the efficacy of language in which Heaney placed such faith’.50 These sentiments are echoed by Alan Gillis, another poet and critic originally from Northern Ireland, who notes that as Heaney’s reputation ‘kept growing and growing’ he became no longer ‘graspable by any single individual’, a fact evidenced by the ‘deeply personal and highly charged’51 reactions to Heaney in Ireland during his career. Indeed, Flynn reflects how, as a young reader, she ‘preferred to question [Heaney’s] “nationalist narratives” and his images of women’, adding, ‘the lens through which I viewed Heaney’s work […] was a very critical one.’52 Reflecting on how she ‘grew up’53 to Heaney, Flynn observes that, since his death, a broader shift has occurred in Britain and Ireland as the ‘previous Heaney naysayers’ begin to ‘re-consider their opinions’54 about his achievement. Intriguingly, O’Toole and Flynn’s sense of Heaney as a defender of poetry’s ‘freedom’ from ‘agenda’55 runs counter to some of the notable criticisms made of him in Ireland during his rise to prominence in America, where he was accused of working towards higher critical  Ibid.  Leontia Flynn, ‘Radically Necessary: Heaney’s Defence of Poetry’, The Irish Review (Cork), Winter–Spring 2014/2015, No. 49/50, Seamus Heaney, p.211. 48  Ibid., p.209. 49  Ibid., p.208. 50  Ibid. 51  Alan Gillis, ‘Heaney’s Legacy’, The Irish Review (Cork), Winter–Spring 2014/2015, No. 49/50, SEAMUS HEANEY (Winter–Spring 2014/2015), p.143. 52  Flynn, ‘Radically Necessary: Heaney’s Defence of Poetry’, p.208. 53  Ibid. 54  Flynn, ‘Poets in the Ninth Circle’, The Poetry Ireland Review, No. 113, A Seamus Heaney Special Issue (27 September 2014), p.42. 55  Flynn, ‘Radically Necessary: Heaney’s Defence of Poetry’, p.211. 46 47

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approval. If ‘praise from Belfast means more’,56 as Peter McDonald once argued, then it seems certain now that the Heaney legacy is secure, both at home and abroad. While it remains to be seen exactly what it means to be a poet in ‘the school of Heaney’, the Heaney Centre at Queen’s University and the Homeplace Centre in Bellaghy have played an active role in shaping the literary climate of Northern Ireland in recent years, hosting regular events and attracting international writers. In 2018, Mark Doty became the first International Visiting Poetry Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, a position created as part of the ten-­year Seamus Heaney Legacy project shared by Queen’s and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Since his death, then, Heaney has helped to facilitate the very cultural matrix that led him, like Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, to produce a poetry of multiple affinities and cultural resonances. Yet there is also a danger inherent in reaching the level of celebrity Heaney has achieved. In 2020, the British government used a portrait of Heaney owned by Queen’s University to promote the centenary of the state of Northern Ireland. Though it is predictable that the anniversary of partition should provoke strong reaction in Ulster, the use of Heaney’s image as a promotional tool proved to be extremely contentious and prompted a public statement by Glenn Patterson, director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, who denied that the Centre granted—or would ever grant—permission for the Heaney portrait to be used in this manner.57 While Heaney looks set to remain a presence both on the curriculum and in the minds of his fellow poets, this incident demonstrates 56  Peter McDonald, ‘Faiths and Fidelities: Heaney and Longley in Mid-Career’, Last before America: Irish and American Writing, edited by Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2001), p.6. 57  Patterson stated: ‘The Seamus Heaney Centre does not own the portrait of Seamus Heaney that the Northern Ireland Office has used in its Telling Our Stories: NI Beyond 100 campaign […] [the] centre could not have given permission for its use and even if it could have, would not have done so—nor would it do anything that involved Seamus Heaney’s name—without first consulting the Heaney family.’ Allison Morris, ‘Director of Seamus Heaney Centre denies giving permission for use of poet’s image in NI centenary branding’, The Irish Times, 23 December, 2020, web. It was later reported as the result of a Freedom of Information request that Queen’s University did give the Northern Ireland Office permission to use the portrait. Queen’s stated: ‘It is not standard practice for the university to seek permission for the use of portraits in their collection with the sitter and/or artist and in this case, the university did not therefore seek permission from the Heaney family about its use. However, university representatives have been in contact with the Heaney family on this mat-

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how easily his poetic achievement may be pressed into service or made part of a wider agenda, despite the powerful defences of poetry’s freedom for which Heaney is often praised today. When considering the direction the Heaney legacy may now take, one is called upon to reflect on what the poet stood for, and, as the various tributes from his fellow poets highlight, for Heaney this was surely the activity of reading poems in a manner sensitive to the writing process itself, with all the complex interplays of craft, inspiration, and influence that this involves. In both poetry and prose Heaney emphasises the poem as the site of an experience of mixture and exchange. This ability of Heaney’s to always turn our attention back to the poem was illustrated poignantly by the 2014 special tribute edition of Poetry Ireland, to which fifty poets from Ireland, Britain, and America, contributed their favourite Heaney poem, along with a brief essay explaining the personal reasons for their choice. So long as this activity of thoughtful reading and writing about poetry continues, the Heaney legacy, like ‘the hay’, will continue ‘to make’.58

ter.’ See Brendan Hughes, ‘Queen’s University breaks three-month silence on NI centenary Seamus Heaney portrait row’, Belfast Live, 17 March, 2021, web. 58  RFCP, p.17.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7

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Thurston, Michael. ‘Robert Lowell’s Monumental Vision: History, Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar American Lyric.’ American Literary History, Vol. 12, No. 1/2 Spring–Summer, 2000. Pp. 79–112. Jstor. Web. Times Literary Supplement. ‘Semaphores of Hurt.’ 15 December, 1972. P.1524. Print. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, Volume II. Trnsltd. Henry Reeve London: Longman, 1862. Print. Tóibín, Colm. ‘Human Chain by Seamus Heaney  – review.’ The Guardian. 21 August, 2010. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/21/ seamus-­heaney-­human-­chain-­review. ——— On Elizabeth Bishop. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Print. Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Print. Treseler, Heather. ‘One Long Poem.’ Boston Review. 17 August, 2016. Web. http://bostonreview.net/poetr y/heather-­t reseler-­e lizabeth-­b ishop­foster-­letters. Tyler, Meg. A Singing Contest: Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980. Print. ——— ‘Poet of Silence, Poet of Talk.’ The New York Times. April 18, 1976. Web. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/20/specials/heaney-­buried.html. ———, ‘Poet of Talk.’ The New York Times. April 18 Seamus Heaney. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998. Print. ——— ‘Second Thoughts & Coda: Tell the truth. Do not be afraid.’ Irish Pages Vol. 8, No. 2, 2014. Heaney. Pp.12–22. Jstor. Web. ——— ‘The Art of Losing.’ New Republic Vol. 234, Issue 12. 3 April, 2006. Pp. 33–37. Print. Weeda, Leendert. Vergil’s Political Commentary: In the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. Warsaw and Berlin: De Gruyter Open, 2015. Print. Williams, William Carlos. An Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions Publications, 1967. Print. ——— The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. Ed. John C.  Thirlwall. New York: McDowell, Obolensky Inc.. Print. Young, James E. ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter, 1992. Pp. 267–296. Jstor. Web.

index1

A Abbey Theatre riots, 172 Adair, Tom, 19n97 Adams House, 3, 128–129 Agriculture, 166, 168 Aiken, Conrad, 14 Air-climbing, 175, 207 Allegory, 73, 179 Allen, Donald, 17 Allen, Michael, 1, 1n1, 20–22, 21n113, 22n119, 25, 25n141, 32, 48, 61, 62, 62n5, 92, 134, 135n45 Allison, Jonathan, 48, 48n96, 61, 63 Alliterative techniques, 75, 100 Alvarez, Al, 17, 18 Americanness of poets, 14 Anglo-American criticism, 25 Anglo-Irish Poetry, 6 Animal imagery, 127

Arcadia, 173, 177 Archiginnasio Library, Bologna, 203n254 Armory Show, 71, 72 Ashbery, John, 17, 24, 33n12, 135, 136, 209–211, 213 Atheism, 100 See also Religion Auden, W. H., 2, 16, 16n83, 16n84, 28, 188 Autobiography, 10, 71, 83 Axelrod, Steven Gould, 111 B Bancroft notebook, 3, 63, 68, 80, 83, 84, 89 Banners, 80, 82 Barillas, William, 50 Barolini, Teodolinda, 153

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Laverty, Seamus Heaney and American Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95568-7

233

234 

INDEX

Baroque era, 139n70 Baym, Nina, 168n61 Beat Generation, 17 Belfast ‘renaissance,’ 19 Bennett, Sarah, 5, 63 Berryman, John, 32, 104, 116 Bibby, Michael, 81 Bibliographies, 13 Bidart, Frank, 136n48 Biden, Joe, 3 Bight, 131 Birdthistle, Elizabeth, 3n9 Bishop, Elizabeth, 15, 29, 106, 111n100, 119, 119n153, 123–125, 127–157, 160, 199–202, 204–208 ‘The Armadillo,’ 124, 201, 202 ‘At the Fishhouses,’ 146–150, 152, 153 ‘The Fish,’ 141, 142, 206 ‘The Gentleman of Shallot,’ 140 ‘Geography III,’ 199 ‘The Map,’ 131, 139–141, 143, 205 ‘The Moose,’ 135, 200 ‘Objects and Apparitions,’ 207 ‘One Art’ villanelle, 138, 155 poems (EBP), 119, 124, 127–129, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139–141, 144–146, 148, 149, 151–153, 155, 156, 201, 205–208 ‘Sestina,’ 138, 139, 139n67, 151–154, 156, 208 Black Mountain Poets, 17 Blackwood, Caroline, 117 Blasphemy, 91 Blast periodical, 13 Blessing, Richard Allen, 53 Bloom, Harold, 29, 49, 50, 118n147 ‘The Anxiety of Influence,’ 49 Bly, Robert, 5, 11, 17, 61, 64, 65, 69, 74, 75, 77, 90, 92, 213 ‘The Morning Glory,’ 74 Boland, Eavan, 2

Bornstein, George, 8n31 Boukolika (ox-herding poems), 162 Bowie, Dorothee, 128 Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry, 134 Brandes, Randy, 10, 64, 70, 134, 134n32, 210 Brearton, Fran, 1n1, 18, 20–22, 25, 26, 105 Breen, Bobby, 192 British Army, 191 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 190 Brock, Geoffrey, 203n255 Brodsky, Joseph, 136 Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, 152, 153, 153n165 Brooks, Cleanth, 17n85, 23 Brooks, Van Wyck, 10 Bucolic poetry, 162 Butscher, Edward, 104 Buxton, Rachel, 4, 6, 12, 12n52, 16n81, 36, 39, 67n28, 148, 161, 164 Byrant, William Cullen, 16n84 C Caillebotte, Gustave, 207 Campbell, Colin, 135 Campbell, Matthew, 2, 9 Camus, Albert, 208n294 Carruth, Allison, 171 Carson, Ciaran, 27, 215 Catholicism, 99 Cavanagh, Michael, 4, 23, 58, 98, 110, 111n100, 112, 115, 118n147, 122, 122n173 Celtic Revivalists, 173 Celtic Tiger era, 2, 171 Censoring effect, 78 Cézanne, Paul, 206 Chalmers, Alexander, 8

 INDEX 

Christianity, 90 See also Catholicism; Protestantism Cinema, Irish, 2 Claassen, Jo-Marie, 168 Clark, Heather, 17n89, 21, 22, 22n115 Clinton, William (‘Bill’), 2, 3n7 Close-reading, 20, 23–26, 51, 102 Cobain, Eve, 96, 97 Cold Harbor, battle of, 194 Cold War, 82, 193 Cole, Henri, 2, 16n82, 30, 71, 78, 122 Coleman, Philip, 96, 97 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 142, 143 ‘Kubla Khan,’ 142 Connolly, Sally, 117n143 Corcoran, Neil, 5, 29, 30, 33, 41, 45, 48, 66, 84, 92, 102, 105, 115, 121, 136, 136n48, 154, 155, 186, 212 Cornell, Joseph, 207 Costello, Bonnie, 142 Coughlan, Patricia, 107, 124n186 Crane, Hart, 13, 14, 100n24 ‘Voyages,’ 100n24 Creeley, Robert, 69n41 Croll, Morris W., 139n70 Crowder, Ashby Bland, 47 Crowe Ransom, John, 15, 31, 203 Cubism, 71 Cummings, E. E., 13, 14 D Dante, 36n29, 115, 153, 194 Purgatorio, 115 Davis, Wes, 19, 161, 183 Deane, Seamus, 35, 95 Dennison, John, 23, 26, 33, 33n11, 38, 42, 43n68, 98, 210 Dickinson, Emily, 211–213, 212n25 Diggory, Terence, 7, 7n26, 8, 95

235

Donoghue, Dennis, 92 ‘Connoisseurs of Chaos,’ 92 Doolittle, Hilda, 73 Doty, Mark, 217 Duchamp, Marcel, 71 Duff Cooper Memorial award, 108 Duncan, Robert, 64 E Eclogue form, 161, 162, 170, 177, 178 Economics, see Keynesian economics Eisenhower, Dwight D., 193, 194 Ekphrasis, 205 Elegies, 31, 45, 47, 88, 95, 97, 113–115, 118, 131, 203 Eliot, T. S., 13, 14, 17, 28, 29, 32, 36, 50, 59, 99, 109, 142, 143, 145, 198 Ellipsis, 191 Ellis, Jonathan, 127, 128n2, 130–132, 202 Emerson Poet in Residence, 1, 128, 182 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8–10, 13, 17, 89n165, 168 Emotion, 44, 45, 141n77, 176, 177, 204 Empathy, 1, 41, 45, 46, 115, 135, 176 Empson, William, 22, 22n115 End-words, 152–155 Epigraphs, 74, 162 Epitaphs, 148, 156 Etymology, 65 Experimentalism, 72, 209 Expressionism, 71 F Falck, Colin, 68n37 Falvey, Deirdre, 4n14 Faulkner, William, 32

236 

INDEX

Fauvism, 71 Feeney, Elaine, 50 Fennell, Desmond, 24, 25, 135, 145 Fenton, James, 109n92 Ferry, David, 165 Fidelity, forms of, 122 Flanagan, T. P., 205 Flood, Alison, 4n15, 207n286 Flynn, Leontia, 216 Flynn, Richard, 152 Foley, Michael, 9n40 Folger Shakespeare Library, 215 Formalism, 43n68, 61, 68, 153, 210 Foster, John Wilson, 58, 65n20, 160 Foster, Ruth, 146, 149 Foster, Thomas C., 47 Frayne, John P., 2n4 Free Speech Movement (FSM), 81 Free verse, 8, 15, 15n76, 113 French language, 14 Friel, Brian, 179 Frost, Robert, 4, 11–15, 15n76, 17n86, 20, 29, 31–45, 31n1, 33n8, 35n20, 48, 51, 55, 59, 65, 67, 67n27, 67n28, 84–88, 85n135, 114, 141n77, 142, 149, 154, 160–182, 200, 207, 211–214 ‘After Apple-Picking,’ 39 ‘The Axe-Helve,’ 36 ‘Birches,’ 180, 181 ‘Death of a Hired Man,’ 36, 85, 85n135, 176 ‘The Doctrine of Excursions,’ 169 Frost-Heaney relationship, 4, 13, 85, 160, 161, 182 ‘Home Burial,’ 36, 177, 178 ‘Mowing,’ 38–40, 214 ‘North of Boston,’ 12, 24, 40, 161, 163, 175, 178, 182 ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ 15 Fulbright Scholarship, 2

Fuller, Margaret, 13 Funerary rituals, 116 Fussell, Edwin, 6 G Gender politics, 41 Geography, 72, 90 Georgic tradition, 177 German memorials, 194 Gillis, Alan, 216 Ginsberg, Allen, 81 Giroux, Robert, 128n4 Glob, Peter V., 89, 205 Gould Axelrod, Steven, 111 Grant, Ulysses S., 193, 194 Gray, Richard, 15n77, 45, 71, 73, 88, 187 Greek, ancient, 165 Greenhouses, 34, 51, 53–55 Gregory, Lady, 172 Grennan, Eamon, 2 H Hacceitas (“this-ness”), 73 Haffenden, John, 35n20 Hall, Donald, 14, 17 Hammond, David, 173 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 187 Hardy, Thomas, 28, 34, 34n16, 206, 212 Hart, Henry, 4, 61, 74, 77, 110, 114, 118n147, 121, 122 Hass, Robert, 136n48 Heaney, Marie, 96, 117n144, 171 Heaney, Seamus, 1–6, 1n2, 3n12, 9–13, 15–20, 16n81, 16n82, 17n89, 22–59, 25n141, 61–93, 67n27, 95–125, 127–157, 159–218, 212n25, 217–218n57 75th birthday event, 215

 INDEX 

‘Above the Brim,’ 42, 43, 165, 176–178, 181, 182 ‘Act of Union,’ 27 ‘After Apple-Picking,’ 39 ‘Alphabets,’ 134, 135 ‘Amputation,’ 43–47 ‘Anahorish, 1944,’ 188 ‘Anything Can Happen,’ 189, 190, 192, 193 ‘At Toombridge,’ 175 ‘The Augean Stables,’ 183 Bancroft notebook, 3, 63, 68, 80, 83, 84, 89 ‘Banks of a Canal,’ 205, 207 ‘The Banner Paint,’ 80 ‘Bann Valley Eclogue,’ 175 ‘The Barn,’ 56 ‘Belfast,’ 83 Bellaghy homeplace, 4, 217 ‘Blackberry Picking,’ 39, 56 ‘Blackbird of Glanmore,’ 45 ‘Bogland,’ 9, 10, 48, 49, 51, 58, 89–91, 99, 101, 205 ‘Bog Queen,’ 105, 106 ‘The Bookcase,’ 166, 175 ‘Boy Driving his Father to Confession,’ 58 ‘Broagh,’ 65–67 canonisation of, 24 ‘Canopy,’ 201 ‘Canticles to the Earth,’ 50, 52 ‘A Cart for Edward Gallagher,’ 129 childhood bucolic, 47 ‘The Clothes Shrine,’ 175 ‘Crediting Poetry’ (CP), 142, 155, 159, 160, 182, 211, 213 ‘The Cure at Troy,’ 2, 3 Death of a Naturalist (DN), 31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 50, 51, 55–57, 55n134, 84, 183 ‘A Deer in Glanmore,’ 129, 135, 200, 201 ‘Digging,’ 40, 57, 58

237

District and Circle (DC), 45, 159, 183, 184, 186, 188–190, 192, 193, 195–199 Door into the Dark (DD), 39, 41, 49, 51, 84 ‘Dylan the Durable?,’ 212 ‘The Early Purges,’ 39 Electric Light (EL), 159–163, 165, 166, 170, 171, 175, 178–183, 192, 197, 199 ‘Elegy,’ 4, 95, 97, 109, 113, 118, 119, 121, 122, 131 ‘Epilogue,’ 116 eulogy, 199 Field Work (FW), 4, 93, 95–98, 109, 109n92, 110, 113–115, 119, 122, 125, 131, 173, 183, 184, 186, 187, 198 Finders Keepers (FK), 23 ‘Fodder,’ 69 ‘Follower,’ 57, 58, 215 ‘For Once, Then, Something,’ 39 ‘Full Face,’ 97n15 ‘Gifts of Rain,’ 63, 65, 68 ‘Glanmore Eclogue,’ 167, 170–173, 176 ‘Glanmore Sonnets,’ 109, 186 Government of the Tongue (GT), 26, 52, 99, 103, 118, 127, 133, 146, 148, 150, 153, 173, 174 ‘The Gravel Walks,’ 146, 148, 150, 151, 154, 207 ‘The Harvest Bow,’ 114, 115 The Haw Lantern (HL), 128, 132–134, 137, 156, 183 ‘Helmet,’ 190, 192, 193 Human Chain (HC), 159, 173, 196, 197, 199, 201, 204, 205, 208 ‘Incertus,’ 165 ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath,’ 36, 52, 102, 103

238 

INDEX

Heaney, Seamus (cont.) ‘In Extremis,’ 162, 163, 165, 180, 183 ‘In Glenelly Valley,’ 37 ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge,’ 110–113 institutionalisation of, 4, 137 ‘The Interesting Case of Nero…,’ 173 ‘Intimidation,’ 80 ‘Kinship,’ 101, 102 ‘A Kite for Aibhín,’ 200–204, 207 ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher,’ 129, 200, 201, 203 ‘The Last Mummer,’ 83 ‘Late Offerings,’ 129 ‘Loughanure,’ 204, 206 ‘Mid-Term Break,’ 34, 39, 44–47, 203 ‘A Migration,’ 200 modesty, reputation for, 156 ‘The Mud Vision,’ 134, 135 nationalist narratives, 216 ‘Near Anahorish: A Visitation,’ 129 ‘Nesting-Ground,’ 75 ‘New Worlds,’ 129 North (N), 24, 27, 73, 75, 78, 79, 84, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106–110, 170 ‘Oracle,’ 67n27 ‘The Other Side,’ 63, 80, 85–88, 90 ‘A Peacock’s Feather,’ 129 ‘Personal Helicon,’ 39 ‘Polish Sleepers,’ 188 portrait of, 121, 188, 217 Preoccupations (P), 32, 97n15, 163 The Redress of Poetry (R), 42, 127, 149, 162, 211 ‘The Rain Stick,’ 141, 142 ‘The Rattle Bag,’ 43, 45, 92, 187 ‘Sandpiper,’ 141, 142 Seeing Things (ST), 78, 128, 139, 161, 180

‘Servant Boy,’ 63, 83–85, 88 ‘A Shiver,’ 188–190, 197 ‘The Skunk,’ 121–124, 122n173, 201 ‘Slave Boy,’ 84 ‘Sonnets from Hellas,’ 183 The Spirit Level (SL), 24, 128, 139, 146, 149–151, 156 Station Island (SI), 41, 42, 108n88, 116, 117, 200 Stepping Stones interviews (SS), 3n7, 57, 71, 76, 131 ‘The Stone Verdict,’ 134, 134n32, 135 ‘Súgán,’ 188, 189 ‘The Thatcher,’ 40 ‘Tinder,’ 79 ‘The Tollund Man,’ 63, 89–91 ‘To Mick Joyce in Heaven,’ 188 ‘A Toy for Catherine,’ 129 ‘The Turnip-Snedder,’ 188 ‘Two Lorries,’ 151, 152, 154–156, 208 ‘Villanelle for an Anniversary,’ 29 ‘A Villanelle for Marie,’ 129 ‘Westering,’ 62, 63 Wintering Out (WO), 29, 61–70, 67n27, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 85, 88, 90, 106 Heaven/hell imagery, 55 Heraclitus, 30 Heroism, 191, 194 Hewitt, John, 11–13, 31n1, 85–87 ‘The Bitter Gourd,’ 12, 12n52, 86 ‘The Glens,’ 85 Higgins, Geraldine, 5 Higgins, Michael D., 3 Hill, Geoffrey, 75–77 ‘Mercian Hymns,’ 75–77 Hilson, Jeff, 185 Hinds, Michael, 190 Hiroshima bombing, 112

 INDEX 

Hobsbaum, Philip, 20–22, 21n110, 21n113, 22n115, 35, 79 Hobsbaum’s Group, 20, 22, 44n77 Hoffman, Tyler, 13, 44, 86, 169 Holiday, Billie, 104n56 Homicide-bombers, 195 Homonyms, 155 Honest Ulsterman, 27, 28 Honorary degrees, 136, 203 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 31n1, 34, 34n16, 35, 72, 139n70, 141 Horace, 163 Howard, Henry (Earl of Surrey), 185 Hughes, Brendan, 21, 218n57 Hughes, Eamonn, 21 Hughes, Ted, 31n1, 33, 35, 43, 50, 51, 55, 58, 92, 102–104, 146, 187, 188 Humour, 55, 71, 125 I Iambic pentameter, 36, 189 Iambic tetrameter, 153 Idealism, 111 Ideological issues, 41 Idiom, 64, 92, 124, 133 Imagism, 73 Impressionism, 71 Indian culture, 12 Indigenous languages, 14 Industrial environment, 44 Inevitability, motif of, 103 Intertextuality, 42, 51, 58, 115, 123, 180, 181 Intimacy, 137 Iraq, conflict in, 192 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 190 Irony, 13, 17, 36, 169, 172, 180, 190 Italy Italian-Irish connections, 203

239

J James, Stephen, 33n8, 98 James, William, 111 Jarrell, Randall, 177 Jenkins, Nicholas, 151, 151n149 Jewishness, 22 Johnson, Colton, 2n4, 85–87, 88n156 Johnson, Lyndon B., 106 Johnston, Dillon, 22, 85, 86n140, 140, 140n76 Jones, Nancy Wynne, 205, 206 Joyce, James, 4, 14, 35, 41, 49, 76 ‘Ulysses,’ 14, 76 K Kavanagh, Patrick, 31n1, 33, 50, 51, 55, 163 Kay, Magdalena, 5, 69, 69n42, 133n29 Keats, John, 114, 142 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ 114, 142 Kelleher, Mary, 203 Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, 4, 6, 6n22, 16n83, 17, 17n85, 18, 31n1, 48, 89, 89n165, 102, 118n147, 146 Ker, W. P., 109n91 memorial lecture, 109n91 Keynesian economics, 163, 167, 171 Kiberd, Declan, 6n22 Kilkenny Arts festival, 96, 99 Kinsella, Thomas, 9, 115 Kite imagery, 199, 202 Kosters, Onno, 189 Kreymbourg, Alfred, 14 Kurkland, Richard, 21n113 L Larkin, Philip, 130, 204 ‘Aubade,’ 204n261 Latin, 135, 164, 165, 176 Lavan, Rosie, 4, 133

240 

INDEX

Lawrence, D. H., 13 Leavis, F. R., 22, 23 New Criticism, 22, 23 Lennard, John, 72, 153 Lerner, Laurence, 35, 43 Levitation imagery, 175 Liberal humanism, 82 Logan, William, 122 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 16n84 Longley, Edna, 6, 11, 20–22, 27, 28n162, 32, 67, 67n29, 76, 76n77, 188 ‘Cliquey Clerihew,’ 28n162 Longley, Michael, 9, 18–21, 21n110, 21n113, 55n134, 58, 79, 79n98, 163, 180, 181, 186n165, 217, 217n56 ‘The Beech Tree,’ 180 Lowell, Robert, 3, 3n10, 4, 7, 15, 15n77, 16n82, 20, 24, 27–29, 32, 49, 65, 79n98, 93, 93n183, 95–125, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 152n154, 160, 184, 186–191, 186n165, 187n171, 187n175, 190n190, 193, 193n204, 194, 194n208, 196–199, 197–198n226, 207, 209, 209n1 ‘Brunetto Latini,’ 115n130 Collected Poems (RLCP), 108n84 ‘The Dolphin,’ 186 ‘Fall 1961,’ 108n84 ‘For the Union Dead,’ 97, 111n100, 193 ‘Hamlet in Russia: A Soliloquy,’ 109 Memoriae Positum, 112 ‘Near the Ocean,’ 15, 49, 106–108 The Quaker Graveyard, 16n82, 99 ‘Skunk Hour,’ 121–124 triumphalism of tone, 113, 121 Lowenfels, Walter, 81 Loy, Mina, 14

Luce, John Victor, 96, 97n8 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 32 Lucy, Seán, 6, 7 Lyric poetry, 26 M MacLaverty, Bernard, 20 Mahon, Derek, 2, 9, 18–21, 30, 82, 92, 97, 127, 217 ‘A Country Kitchen,’ 30 Malahat Review, 80 Mammary imagery, 149 Mandelstam, Ossip, 36n29, 153, 174 Mantuan (Battista the Mantuan), 163 Marot, Clement, 163 Martyrdom, 111 Marx, Leo, 91n175 Mason, David, 33n8 Materialism, 32 McCabe, Susan, 152, 154 McCartney, Colum, 115, 115n130, 116 McConnell, Gail, 22, 23, 82, 104n56 McDonald, Peter, 23, 25, 27, 28, 217, 217n56 McGlinchey, Michael, 165 McGowan, Philip, 150, 150n135 McGuckian, Medbh, 215, 216 ‘Night Journey of the Solar Bark,’ 215 Media coverage, 192 Medusa, 104 Meliboeus, 166–173, 176, 178 Melodies, 177, 178 Melville, Herman, 100, 141n81 Moby Dick, 100, 141n81 Memorization, 24 Metaphor, 30, 45, 49, 54–56, 79n98, 90, 106, 130, 168, 202 Metaphysical imagery, 175 Methfessel, Alice, 128, 146

 INDEX 

Middleton, Colin, 206 Miller, Karl, 24n133, 80 Mills, Rebecca, 100, 100n23 Miłosz, Czesław, 133, 136, 160, 188, 198, 198n227 Milton, John, 163 Modernism, 14 Moeris, 173, 174, 176, 182 Montague, John, 2, 11, 18, 50, 61, 63, 70, 107n78, 140, 163, 214, 214n40 Moore, Geoffrey, 16, 16n82, 70, 70n46, 73, 99 Moore, Marianne, 13–15, 32 Morisco, Gabriella, 203 Morris, Allison, 217n57 Morrison, Blake, 18, 19, 33n8, 48, 69, 69n41, 121, 164, 164n27, 213 Morrissey, Sinead, 215 Mortality, theme of, 200 Mortar explosions, 192 Muldoon, Paul, 2, 19, 96, 108n88, 127, 148, 171, 215, 216 Murder, 116, 120, 183, 194 Murphy, Andrew, 85 Murphy, Richard, 49, 50, 134n32 Music, 2, 36, 55, 118, 141, 148, 185, 195 Myths, 20, 48, 49, 73, 88, 91 N National Gallery of Ireland, 205 Nationalism, 17n85 literary, 17n85 Nationality, 8 Nationhood, 51 Naturism, 65 Neologism, 141 New Criticism, 13, 22, 22n119, 23, 34, 81, 82

241

New York Poets, 17 Ni Houlihán, Cathleen, myth of, 91 Nixon, Richard, 83, 83n117 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1 Nuhn, Ferner, 169, 170 O Obituaries, 3, 96 Objectivity, 105 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 172 O’Brien, Eugene, 29, 160 O’Brien, Justin, 208n294 O’Brien Kivlehan, Rosalie, 136 Oceanic images, 100 O’Donagh, Thomas, 185 O’Donoghue, Bernard, 65, 65n20, 115, 170, 170n76, 172, 179 O’Driscoll, Dennis, 24, 41, 45, 67, 71, 83, 88, 92n177, 96, 110, 116, 119, 125, 132, 136, 139, 178, 198, 203, 209, 212 Off-rhyme, 155 O’Kelly, Sean B., 34n16 Olson, Charles, 10, 68, 69, 92 ‘At Yorktown,’ 92n178 O’Neill, Louis, 119–121 Onomatopoeic language, 37 Orange parades, 80 Orthography, 66n20 Orwell, Sonia, 97n14 O’Shea, Edward, 63, 63n9, 64, 80, 90 O’Shea, Helen, 122 Otherness, 87 O’Toole, Fintan, 4, 215, 216 Ox-herding poems (boukolika), 162 P Pamphlets, 24, 145 Parabolic nature of poetry, 132 Parallelism, grammatical, 86

242 

INDEX

Pararhyme, 121 Parfitt, Matthew, 177 Parker, E. W., 16n81 Parker, Joseph, 190, 190n190, 191 Parker, Michael, 35, 50, 51, 55n134, 61, 62, 69, 202 Parker, Stephen, 190, 191 Parker, Stewart, 20, 44n77 Parkinson, Tom, 61, 81 Parody, 172 Partition of Ireland, 217 Pascoli, Giovanni, 202, 203 ‘L’Aquilone,’ 202, 203 Pastures on the imaginary of Italians conference, 203n254 Pathos, 45, 120, 199, 208 Patriarchal conceptions, 59 Patterson, Glenn, 217, 217n57 Paulin, Tom, 12, 127, 128, 139n70, 199 Peace process, Northern Irish, 2 See also Sectarianism; ‘Troubles’ the; War Penn Warren, Robert, 22 Pentameter, iambic, 36, 100, 189 Perkell, Christine, 170 Perloff, Marjorie, 103 Petrarch, 153, 185 rhyme scheme/sonnet, 192 Phi Beta Kappa poem, 134, 135, 166 Photographs, 78, 89, 89n166, 92n177 Pickard, Zachariah, 146, 147, 149, 150 Pindar, 208, 208n294 Pinsky, Robert, 136n48 Plath, Sylvia, 36, 52, 102–106, 102n40, 118, 119, 134, 153 ‘Ariel,’ 102, 103 ‘Lady Lazarus,’ 104, 105 Poe, Edgar Allan, 7 Poet laureate, 24, 136, 215 Pointillism, 71 Poirier, Richard, 38 Porter, Peter, 19

Potts, Donna L., 162, 163 Pound, Ezra, 13, 14, 163, 164, 214 Protestantism, 122, 124 Psychology, of child characters, 57 Q Quatrains, 9, 44, 45, 79, 85, 90, 101, 101n29, 113, 168 Quinn, Justin, 5, 26 R Racial politics, 84 Radio broadcasting, 96n3, 97n13 Ramazani, Jahan, 113 Randall, James, 64, 68–70, 69n38, 77, 80, 89, 89n166, 101n29, 121 Rankin Russell, Richard, 84, 104n56, 195 Ransom, John Crowe, 15, 20, 29, 31, 33, 34, 45–47, 59, 203 ‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,’ 45 ‘Dead Boy,’ 34, 45, 47 Realism, 211 Reciprocity, areas of, 78, 141, 184 Reeve, Henry, 72n59, 91n174 Refugees, 178 Regan, Stephen, 185, 187 Regionalist poets, 12n52 Religion, 88, 190 See also Atheism; Blasphemy; Catholicism; Christianity; Protestantism; Rituals, holy Renaissance era poetry, 107 Revivalists, see Celtic Revivalists Rich, Adrienne, 119 Richardson, Mark, 141n77, 176n103, 177n111, 213n30 Richmond Ellmann Memorial Lectures, 145 Richtarik, Marilynn, 44n77

 INDEX 

Ricks, Christopher, 124n186 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 211 Rituals, holy, 121 See also Religion Roethke, Theodore, 20, 29, 31–34, 47–59, 55n134, 99, 182 greenhouse poems, 34 ‘In Praise of Prairie,’ 48, 49, 51, 99 ‘Moss-Gathering,’ 50, 55, 55n134, 56 ‘My Papa’s Waltz,’ 57 ‘Old Florist,’ 57 ‘Root Cellar,’ 56 ‘The Saginaw Song,’ 57 Romanesque style, 76 Roman poetics, 164 Roosevelt, Theodore, 72, 169 Rorabaugh, W. J., 81 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 108 S Saddlemyer, Ann, 170 Salter, Mary Jo, 143n94 Samuels, Peggy, 143n96, 201, 201n243, 204 San Francisco Renaissance, 17 Savio, Mario, 81 Schuyler, James, 82, 83n116 ‘May 1972,’ 76, 82, 83, 83n116, 83n117, 97n8, 111n104, 166, 178 Schwartz, Lloyd, 124, 146, 146n108, 146n113, 149, 205, 205n268 Seager, Allan, 49n102 Sectarianism, 82 Sexton, Anne, 32 Shakespeare, William, 134, 142, 179, 180, 215 Hamlet, 109, 163, 180 Macbeth, 44

243

Shaw, Colonel, 111 Simic, Charles, 147 Simmons, James, 18, 20 Simpson, Louis, 5, 17n86, 48n96 Slavery, 82 Smith, A. J. M., 83, 83n117 Smith, Stevie, 212 Snodgrass, W. D, 72 Snyder, Gary, 5, 11, 17, 61, 62, 64–66, 65n17, 68, 68n32, 68n37, 69, 81, 90, 92, 213 ‘Piute Creek,’ 65, 65n17 ‘Riprap,’ 68 ‘Social evils,’ 82 Sociological idiom of poetry, 64 Spears, Monroe K., 100n24 Staples, Hugh B., 123 Stevens, Wallace, 13, 14, 35, 50, 70, 211–213, 213n31 ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’ 211, 213n31 Storey, Mark, 7 Stuyvesant, Peter, 193 Subjectivity, female, 105 Suicide, 103 Survivalist texts, 154, 195 Symbolism, 193 Synge, J. M., 163, 170, 170n76, 172, 173 ‘In the Shadow of the Glen,’ 170n76 ‘Playboy of the Western World,’ 172 T Talbot, John, 164, 164n26 Tercets, 44, 87, 117, 130, 131, 144, 203 Terrorism, 192 See also Peace process, Northern Irish Theocritus of Syracuse, 162 Thirlwall, John C, 72n58

244 

INDEX

Thomas, Edward, 66–68, 67n27, 67n28 ‘Adlestrop,’ 66, 67 Thompson, Lawrence, 33n9, 165n35, 214n38 Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 7n26, 89n165, 100 Thurston, Michael, 193, 193n204, 194, 194n208 Tityrus, 166–170, 172, 173, 178 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 72, 72n59, 91, 91n174 Tóibín, Colm, 128n2, 130, 138, 196, 196n220, 199, 202n248 Topography, Irish, 140 Tracy, Bob, 90 Transatlantic poetics, 4 Travisano, Thomas, 140, 141, 145n106, 204 Treseler, Heather, 146, 149 Triadic phrase, 148 Trinitarian Church, 123 Trinity College, Dublin, 21, 96 Triptych form, 87 ‘Troubles’ the, 83, 88, 97, 99 See also Peace process, Northern Irish; Sectarianism; Terrorism; War Tyler, Meg, 98, 109, 186, 186n165, 189, 189n186, 192 Tyrannicide, 107 U Uladh, native culture of, 12 Ulrich, Carolyn F, 13n64 Unionists (Ulster), 11–13, 19, 28, 40, 65, 89, 144, 217 United States (US) agriculture, 166, 168 American frontier myth, 48 American modernists, 14 experimentalists, 209

Heaney’s reception, 27 Heaney’s residencies, 5 industrialisation of, 166 literary criticism, 22, 23 press culture, 2 protest poetry, 80–82, 84, 85, 93 Universality, poetics of, 26 V Varadkar, Leo, 3 Vaught Brogan, Jacqueline, 152, 152n155 Vendler, Helen, 3, 13–15, 22–27, 42, 50, 50n106, 87, 105, 129, 135, 138, 139n67, 145, 152, 160n7, 184, 212 The Music of What Happens, 24 Vergil, 160–166, 168, 170, 171, 173–180, 182, 199 See also Virgil Vernacular language, 185 Victimhood, 26 Vietnam War, 77 Vigilance, 211 Virgil, 160–166, 168 Aeneid, 4, 161, 162, 180, 199 The Georgics, 163 ‘The Golden Bough,’ 161 Virtuosity, 152, 154, 156 Voyeurism, 124n186 W Wachtel, Eleanor, 29 Walcott, Derek, 136, 136n48 War, 81, 83, 83n116, 83n117, 114, 194, 197 antiwar poetry, 81, 83 See also Cold War; Peace process, Northern Irish; Terrorism; ‘Troubles’ the; Vietnam War

 INDEX 

Warren, Robert Penn, 22, 176 Weeda, Leendert, 166 Whitman, Walt, 2, 7–10, 8n30, 16n84, 17, 50, 89n165, 91, 95, 186, 213 ‘Leaves of Grass,’ 8n30 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 4 Williams, William Carlos, 5, 14, 68–70, 69n37, 69n41, 72n58, 92 ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ 71 Wilson, Harold, 176 Wimsatt, W. K, 23 The Verbal Icon, 23 Winslow, Warren, 100 ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,’ 108n84 Witemeyer, Hugh, 8n31 Wolfe Tone Annual, 92n177 Wordsworth ,William, 31n1, 48, 55, 57

245

Wright, James, 210 Wyatt, Thomas, 185 Wynne Jones, Nancy, 205 Y Yeats, William Butler, 2–4, 2n4, 6–10, 7n26, 8n31, 13, 24, 27, 28, 31n1, 34, 35, 49, 50, 61, 79, 83, 95, 97, 108n88, 114, 114n125, 117, 119–121, 135, 142, 143, 143n93, 172, 173, 173n86, 192, 203, 204, 212 ‘At Ballynahinch Lake,’ 175 ‘The Fisherman,’ 119 ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ 202 ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ 142, 143n93 ‘Samhain,’ 114 Summer School, Sligo, 24 ‘The Wild Swans at Coole,’ 204 Young, James E., 194 Yugoslav conflicts, 178