Seamus Justin Heaney

The poetry of Seamus Justin Heaney (born 1939) reveals his skill with language and his command of form and technique. In his poems, Heaney balances personal, topical, and universal themes. He approaches his themes from a modest perspective, creating depth of meaning and insight while remaining accessible to a wide audience.

Seamus Justin Heaney's attempts to develop poetic language in which meaning and sound are intimately related result in concentrated, sensually evocative poems characterized by assonant phrasing, richly descriptive adjectives, and witty metaphors. Critics note that Heaney is concerned with many of contemporary Northern Ireland's social and cultural divisions. For example, Irish and Gaelic colloquialisms are often intermingled with more direct and straightforward English words for a language that is both resonant and controlled. Viewing the art of poetry as a craft, Heaney stresses the importance of technique as a means to channel creative energies toward sophisticated metaphysical probings. He explores a wide range of subjects in his poems, including such topics as nature, love, the relationship between contemporary issues and historical patterns, and legend and myth. Although some critics debate Robert Lowell's assessment of him as "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," they agree that Heaney is a poet of consistent achievement. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

Born April 13, 1939, Heaney's childhood in a rural area near Ulster, Northern Ireland, informs much of his poetry, including his first volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), for which he won immediate popular and critical success. In most of these poems, Heaney describes a young man's responses to beautiful and threatening aspects of nature. In "Digging," the poem which opens this volume, he evokes the rural landscape where he was raised and comments on the care and skill with which his father and ancestors farmed the land. Heaney announces that as a poet he will metaphorically "dig" with his pen. In many of the poems in his next volume, Door into the Dark (1969), he probes beneath the surface of things to search for hidden meaning. Along with pastoral poems, Heaney focuses on rural laborers and the craftsmanship they display in their work.

Heaney left Northern Ireland when the "troubles" resumed in 1969. After teaching in the United States, he settled with his family in the Republic of Ireland. The poems in Wintering Out (1972) reveal a gradual shift from personal to public themes. Heaney begins to address the social unrest in Northern Ireland by taking the stance of commentator rather than participant. After having read P. V. Glob's The Bog People, an account of the discovery of well-preserved, centuries-old bodies found in Danish bogs, Heaney wrote a series of poems about Irish bogs. Some of the bodies found in Danish bogs are believed to have been victims of primitive sacrificial rituals, and in Wintering Out Heaney projects a historical pattern of violence that unites the ancient victims with those who have died in contemporary troubles. In North (1975), which some consider his finest collection, Heaney continues to use history and myth to pattern the universality of violence. The poems in this volume reflect his attempt to tighten his lyrics with more concrete language and images.

The poems in Field Work (1979) concern a wide range of subjects. Critics praised several love poems dealing with marriage, particularly "The Harvest Bow," which Harold Bloom called "a perfect lyric." In the ten-poem sequence "The Glanmore Sonnets," Heaney describes a lush landscape and muses on such universal themes as love and mortality, ultimately finding order, meaning, and renewal in art. Other books of significance by Heaney include Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (1980) and Sweeney Astray (1984). The former, which includes prose pieces on the origins and development of his poetry as well as essays on other poets, lends insight into Heaney's poetics. Sweeney Astray, a story-poem based on the ancient Irish tale Buile Suibhne, relates the adventures of Suibhne, or Sweeney, as he is transformed from a warrior-king into a bird because of a curse. The narrative follows Sweeney's exile from humanity and his wanderings and hardships as a bird, mixing prose descriptions of events with lyrical renderings of Sweeney's ravings as he responds to the harshness and beauty of nature.

Heaney's next volume of poetry, Station Island (1984), is made up of three sections. The opening part consists of lyrical poems about events in everyday life. The title sequence, which comprises the second section, is based on a three-day pilgrimage undertaken by Irish Catholics to Station Island, where they seek spiritual renewal. While on Station Island, Heaney ruminates on personal and historical events and encounters the souls of dead acquaintances and Irish literary figures who inspire him to reflect upon his life and art. In the third section, "Sweeney Redivivus," Heaney takes on the persona of Sweeney, attempting to recreate Sweeney's highly sensitized vision of life. Although critics debated the success of the three individual sections, most agreed that Station Island is an accomplished work that displays the range of Heaney's talents.

Further Reading

Abse, Dannie, editor, Best of the Poetry Year 6, Robson, 1979.

Begley, Monie, Rambles in Ireland, Devin-Adair, 1977.

Broadbridge, Edward, editor, Seamus Heaney, Danmarks Radio (Copenhagen), 1977.

Brown, Terence, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, Rowman & Littlefield, 1975.

Buttel, Robert, Seamus Heaney, Bucknell University Press, 1975.

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography: Contemporary Writers, 1960 to the Present, Gale, 1992.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 25, 1983, Volume 37, 1986. □

Seamus Heaney , 1939–, Irish poet, one of the finest poets writing in English today, b. Londonderry (now Derry), Northern Ireland. In his early works, such as Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), Heaney is a lyrical nature poet, writing with limpid simplicity about the disappearing world of unspoiled rural Ireland. He moved from Belfast to the Irish Republic in 1972, ultimately settling in Dublin. In works such as North (1975), Field Work (1979), and The Haw Lantern (1987), Heaney attempts to grapple with Ireland's bloody past and troubled present. In Station Island (1984), often declared his best sustained work, he tries to come to terms with his own exile, reworking Dante to dramatize a tragic vision of Irish history. Later poems, alternately elegiac and visionary and filled with a love for the common objects of the world, are included in Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010). Selections from his poetry were published in 1990 and 1998.

Extremely evocative yet clear and direct, balanced between the personal and the topical, Heaney's carefully crafted poetry has been praised for its powerful imagery, dense yet nuanced language, meaningful content, musical phrasing, and compelling rhythms. Widely recognized as Ireland's greatest poet since William Butler Yeats , Heaney was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of his critical, biographical, and autobiographical essays were collected in Preoccupations (1980), The Government of the Tongue (1989), and Finders Keepers (2002). He is also a skillful translator, his works in this genre including the medieval Irish Sweeney Astray (1984), Sophocles's Philoctetes (tr. as The Cure at Troy, 1990) and Antigone (tr. as The Burial at Thebes, 2004), the highly acclaimed Beowulf (2000), and the libretto of Janáček's song cycle Diary of One Who Vanished (2001). Heaney is also a teacher, at Oxford (1989–94) and Harvard (1985–); his Oxford lectures on poetry were assembled in The Redress of Poetry (1995).

Bibliography: See studies by R. Buttel (1975), T. Curtis (1982, repr. 2001), B. Morrison (1982), H. Hart (1992), M. Parker (1993), J. W. Foster (1995), R. F. Garratt, ed. (1995), C. Molloy and P. Carey, ed. (1996), M. Allen, ed. (1997), E. Andrews, ed. (1992 and 1998), H. Vendler (1998), H. Bloom, ed. (2003), F. Collins (2003), and A. B. Crowder and J. D. Hall, ed. (2007); B. O'Donoghue, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2009).

Heaney, Seamus (Justin) (1939– ), Irish poet, educated at St Columb's College, Derry, and Queen's University, Belfast. After lecturing on poetry at Queen's for six years he moved in 1972 to the Republic of Ireland. His early poetry is rooted in the farmland of his youth, and communicates a strong physical sense of environment with subtlety and economy of words, as in Eleven Poems (1965), Death of a Naturalist (1966), and Door into the Dark (1969). His later work, densely written and often poignant, as in Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), and Field Work (1979), broods on the cultural and historical implications of words and explores their use in wider social and political contexts. Selected Poems, 1965–1975 and Preoccupations (essays and lectures, 1968–1978) appeared in 1980. Station Island (1984), which contains a sequence of poems on Lough Derg and includes a ghostly encounter with J. Joyce, was followed by Sweeney Astray (1984) and The Haw Lantern (1987), which includes a moving sonnet sequence on the death of his mother. In 1989 he was appointed professor of poetry at Oxford. Other volumes include New Selected Poems 1966–87 (1990), Seeing Things (1991), Sweeney's Flight (1992), and Electric Light (2001). The Government of the Tongue, a collection of essays, was published in 1988. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995: his Nobel Lecture, Crediting Poetry (1995), was included in his Collected Poems 1966–96 (1999). His highly praised translation of Beowulf appeared in 1999.

Heaney, Seamus (1939– ) Irish poet, b. Northern Ireland. His early volumes, such as Death of a Naturalist (1966), establish a link between soil and language. Later works, such as North (1975), Field Work (1979), and Station Island (1984), examine the political and historical connotations of words. He won the Whitbread Prize for The Spirit Level (1996). His essay collections include The Government of the Tongue (1988). Heaney received the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature. In 1999, he won a second Whitbread Prize for a translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.

http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1995; http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/heaney