SEAMUS HEANEY:
A CONFERENCE AND
COMMEMORATION
10-13 APRIL, 2014
ABSTRACTS
Chris Allen
Trinity College Dublin – Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing –
challen@tcd.ie
Between the God in the Tree and the Tree in the Mind
There is an image of Seamus Heaney on Boa Island standing over his own reflection in a stone font. The font is
accidental, an unintended reservoir left by the carver of the famous statue as he sought to accentuate the
separateness of two faces in the confines of a single head. There is a sense in which its, (the font’s), existence is
the greater part of the genius of the whole; even the words which best describe this little rainwater vessel –
font, reservoir, mirror - seem by their symbolic natures to substantiate and credit the assertion. Using this image
as its template, this paper will outline the particular duality of inheritance and legacy in Irish poetic tradition. It
will argue that in the looking back and looking forward that poets do, (and Irish poets do it more than most),
there is a similar production, an unintended reservoir, a font of greater genius, in hand.
The metaphor created by the image comes very close to the beat of what Seamus Heaney attempted to uncover
at the heart of poetic language. The metaphor also implies a deliberate hand working outside of the poet’s
consciousness. It might seem audacious to suggest that there are fonts in language which Seamus Heaney could
have remained unaware of - but Seamus Heaney himself allowed for the ‘deep, unconscious’ in poetry, as in the
following passage from his essay, The God in the Tree;
“Poetry of any power is always deeper than its declared meaning. The secret between the words, the
binding element, is often a psychic force that is elusive, archaic and only half apprehended by maker and
audience.”
Drawing on his critical work, I will review the ways in which Seamus Heaney engaged this element in language.
Focusing ultimately on his relationship to older Irish-language poetry, I will present ways in which this metaphor
can create new critical perspectives on Heaney’s poetic legacy.
I will focus on Seamus Heaney’s translations of Buile Suibhne. Heaney made two distinct translations of this
text, the first of these in 1972 and a second one seven years later in 1979. I will demonstrate that by the time
Heaney begins his second translation there has been a significant adjustment in his relationship to the original
Irish text. By the time he finishes the second translation his relationship to the whole corpus of older-Irish
language poetry has changed. This change provides a new perspective which can broaden critical
understandings of Heaney’s achievements.
In 1972 Heaney undoubtedly saw in Buile Suibhne a means to provide an ‘adequate response’ to the conflict in
Northern Ireland. I will look at the forces which drew him to the old Irish text and explore the reasons why his
first translation was never published. I will look at language itself through Heideggerian and Burkean thought
in order to establish a framework in which to assess Heaney’s relationship to the Irish language. This paper will
argue that not only does Heaney carve out for himself a ‘third space’; a site of repose in which he would find
sanctuary for the remainder of his writing life - but in removing the weight of ideological harnessing from the
Irish manuscript material, he effectively removes this material from the binary to which it was consigned by
the Irish Literary Revival. In doing this Heaney returns us- in our cultural relationship to that material - to a
point in history which pre-dates Charlotte Brookes.
I will refer to a range of Heaney’s critical prose in support of these arguments as well as using Burke, Hedigger
and Bhabha to elucidate on concepts of language. I will situate Heaney’s translations in the context of other
translations of the older Irish language poetry. I will use the text of the poem ‘Punishment’ to engage the
obvious dialogue between the subtext of the argument I make and some of the critical responses to the
volume North. I will ground the paper within the framework of the Boa island statue and the metaphoric
potential of the unintended font to reshape critical perspectives on Heaney’s poetic legacy.
Nicholas Allen
University of Georgia
na@uga.edu
Slow Erosions: Seamus Heaney, History and Water
This paper will look at the imagery of water in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. The idea is to connect his
poetry to a global history that connects the insular history of Ireland to broader trends of cultural
connection. The shattering of empires in the early twentieth century foregrounded the histories of
nations, nations that revised their origins in denial of the world systems to which they had been
attached; the consequences of these attachments, in plantation, colonization and violence have
erupted into literature with unsettling force. This is the stuff of ghosts and hauntings, two classic
markers of the Irish cultural experience. Heaney dressed these experiences in mist, dew and Atlantic
seepage. Water is a medium in his work that leaks into new forms of cultural association that are still
to settle into shape. Looking at poems from Wintering Out, North, and Station Island, this paper will
read Heaney’s water world as a fluid and sometimes-subterranean attempt to undo the solid state of
a troubled given place, ‘things found clean on their own shapes,| Water and ground in their extremity’.
Dr. Rose Atfield
Brunel University
joyrosemary@talktalk.net
“…a solid man
A pillar to himself and to his trade…” Heaney and the Father archetype.
Heaney described himself in an interview as “Jungian in religion”. His examination of self is powerfully
extended through the Father archetype which Jung suggested “appears in the form of a spirit in
dreams…comports itself like a ghost…mobilizes philosophical and religious convictions…”. Heaney
achieves a potent balance between the material and the spiritual in his reminiscences, establishing his
father in terms of the motif of the ashplant, his badge of authority, as a Jungian archetypal “Wise old
Man”. In “The Stone Verdict”(1987), in which the death of his father is projected, a tender concern for
an appropriate ‘judgement’ can be read in Jungian, archetypal terms, as the redeployment of classical
myth gives the father a god-like stature. In the volumes published subsequent to his father’s death,
the spiritual dimension is more directly recognized and celebrated. In “Man and Boy”(1991), this
experience recalls the death of his father’s father, emphasising the archetypal quality of this recurring
situation in a complex of déjà-vu and prefiguration in the time continuum.
In response to the death of Lowell, a literary father, Heaney suggested, “When a person whom
we cherished dies, all that he stood for goes a-begging, asking us somehow to occupy the space he
filled, to assume into our own lives values which we admired in his and thereby to conserve his unique
energy.” This paper will consider something of what Heaney stood for, the values admired in his life
and will celebrate his “unique energy”, through some brief references to poems presenting the
archetypal father from each collection and a detailed reading of “The Butts” from Human Chain.
Dr Anne Baden-Daintree
University of Bristol
anne.baden-daintree@bristol.ac.uk
An Intimate Intrusion: Heaney Translating Henryson
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid brings its readers into a voyeuristically intimate relationship
with the sufferings of Cresseid. While Henryson’s continuation of Chaucer’s narrative exhibits
both moral judgement and sensitive empathy, Heaney’s translation emphasises this latter
generosity of attitude toward Cresseid. However, just as Henryson’s readers intrude on
Cresseid’s grief and ‘tragedie’ (in ways that extend far beyond Chaucer’s conception), so does
Heaney intrude his own presence into the fireside setting of Henryson’s long ‘winter nicht’.
When the narrator’s voice explains how ‘I began my work/ On this retelling’ it is as much
Heaney’s retelling of Henryson as it is Henryson’s retelling of Chaucer.
While Heaney downplays the difficulty of reading Middle Scots, and suggests that his task is
simply a ‘modernisation’ of Henryson, The Testament is deeply concerned with retaining what
Heaney calls the ‘imaginative sympathy’ that Henryson exhibits toward Cresseid, as well as a
desire to ‘keep the accent’ of his poetry. When the Scots threatens to become impenetrable,
Heaney simplifies and provides a cleaner modern syntax with only a nod to the ‘hidden
Scotland’ of his own native language. But occasionally, as Helen Cooney observes, Heaney
breaks the sensitivity to Henryson’s register by choosing to ‘intrude an obtrusive or seemingly
inappropriate word or phrase’. Cooney suggests that often such intrusions in fact enhance
meaning, whereby delving deeper etymologically into Heaney’s word choice reveals much
about the original poem. But these ‘intrusions’ also deepen the sense of Heaney’s presence,
so this poem becomes less a translation, and more a mediation. Heaney’s inspiration to
undertake this work was the ‘sensation of intimacy’ with Henryson’s speaker. What the reader
gains from Heaney is a sensation of welcoming intimacy conflating the personae of Heaney and
Henryson, at the same time that it draws us in to an uncomfortable intimacy with Cresseid.
Jennie Baker
University of St Andrews
jbb3@st-andrews.ac.uk
‘The music of what happens: The End of the Poem and Heaney’s Present’
One of the many ways in which Heaney’s particular technical achievements have
influenced, and continue to influence, contemporary poetic practice must be through his use
of what this paper refers to as Closural Deictic Shift, or the movement of a poem’s
coordinates, or deictic centre, in the final lines of the poem. This type of shift is increasingly
relied upon as a closural strategy, and as a signal to the reader that the poem is reaching its
end, but Heaney employs closural shift for an additional purpose: to end the poem in the
present moment, and often in the present continuous.
This paper describes Heaney’s distinctive use of this type of shifting, both as an essential
means of giving the work its celebrated immediacy, and of giving the poem its ending; a
closural preference strong enough that it may serve as an element of poetic style through
which one may trace the reaches of Heaney’s closural poetic influence. For example, can any
poet writing now use words such as ‘still’, ‘yet’, ‘now’, or ‘this’ in their final lines without
thinking of Heaney’s endings, or their sense of things continuing? While such words are
frequently employed in the closural space in order to (re)locate the end of the poem in the
present moment, they are by no means the only strategy Heaney uses to accomplish this.
Drawing examples from his poetry, this paper demonstrates a few of the ways Heaney
employs the compositional present, the poetic present, and the immediate moment as
indicated by his use of the imperative, direct address, and questions in his final lines in
order to shift his poetic endings, and to achieve specific closural effects. The paper concludes
by asking to what extent, and in which ways, this distinguishing closural preference is both
required of and reflective of Heaney’s poetics, his conceptualisation of poetry as a
transformative vision and a response or answer, his description of the ‘sensation of
rightness’ when one reads a poem which ‘makes an indelible first impression in the ear and
survives in the mind’, and his belief that ‘we go to poetry… to be forwarded within
ourselves’.
Sarah Berry
University of Connecticut
sarah.berry@uconn.edu
Heaney’s Human Chains
The title of Seamus Heaney’s final volume of poetry, Human Chain (2010),
demonstrates his recurrent interest, in both his poetry and criticism, in the way that people are
connected to one another, personally, historically, politically, and literarily. At the same time,
the ambiguity of the word “chain” suggests Heaney’s ambivalence toward such connections.
Sometimes these connections are inspiring or comforting, but they can also be painful or
confining. In this paper, I will explore the way Heaney invokes and even constructs these
human chains in his later poetry. Along the way, I will distinguish between two different
modes of invocation: intertextual, which involves cultivating lyric intimacy between poems,
and interpersonal, which involves cultivating lyric intimacy with another poet. For Heaney,
the paradoxical nature of formal intertextuality allows the poet to distance himself from the
memory of the dead without entirely forgetting them. For example, in “Audenesque,” Heaney
uses apostrophe and meter to create a simultaneous sense of simultaneity and genealogy.
I see the early 1980s as a key turning point in his poetry, and the volumes that follow
Station Island reflect this shift in his approach to figures from the past. In order to trace a
rough outline of this trajectory, I will compare “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “Station Island,”
“Audenesque,” and a few poems in Human Chain. While the tropes and allusions Heaney
uses are not in themselves unique, Heaney puts them to a unique cultural-political use. The
relationships with these personal, political, and literary figures that Heaney constructs in his
poems are indicative of his larger mode of positioning his work in relation to his personal and
political circumstances as well as the tradition. Ultimately, I will suggest that these
intertextual and interpersonal invocations are a part of Heaney’s larger attempt to cultivate a
“displaced” perspective in his poetry, a project that is articulated in his 1985 lecture Place
and Displacement.
Don Bogen
University of Cincinnati
donald.bogen@uc.edu
"Loosening Gravity": Seamus Heaney's California of the Mind
While Seamus Heaney's year as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 19701971 and his return as Beckman Professor in spring of 1976 had profound effects on his life and
career--including his decision to move to the Republic of Ireland and his development of "Englands
of the Mind," a pivotal essay among several exploring the role of place in his first collection of prose-the experience itself comes up rarely in his poetry of the 1970s. It is not mentioned at all in North
(1976) but is discussed in "Westering," the final poem of Wintering Out (1972) and two poems from
Field Work (1979): "A Postcard from North Antrim" and "The Skunk." While these three poems may
at first seem fairly minor works, they embody a distinct set of strategies and tropes in Heaney's
ongoing development of the poetry of place, one of the signature achievements of his career. These
include a form of temporal displacement that parallels the physical displacement of the two periods
he spent outside Ireland; a distinctive nocturnal atmosphere open to dreams and nostalgia; and a
particular sensuality, anchored in the olfactory, that compounds the new world of nature in
California with the more familiar desires of a decade-long marriage. Heaney's poetic engagement
with his time in Berkeley does not so much capture the experience as open paths for new ways of
exploring "the Irish memory bank," as he put it in an interview. My paper will examine the vision of
California developed in these poems and its liberating potential for Heaney's later work.
Dr. Kevin Cantwell
Middle Georgia State College (U.S.)
kevin.cantwell@mga.edu
Anagram in Heaney’s “The Early Purges”: Sense, Sentiment, and Subversion in the Political Lyric
The painter Francis Bacon has spoken of “the brutality of fact” as he defines the degree to
which art can represent the messiness of the body and by which the corporeal glop of oil paint
conjures the flesh. Aware himself of such visceral claims, Seamus Heaney’s well-known
representations of rural life identifies initiation in a poem like “The Early Purges,” where the matterof-fact life of the farm sends a chill of knowledge through the young boy. Readers have noted that
sense of the poem, yet little has been made of how the rhyme scheme equivocates at one point; one
spot, where the sound is not exact, draws attention to a strategy of anagram that lets us examine
the terms of “sense” and “sentiment” as distorted echoes of an even colder worldliness of
Malthusian calculation. Early on Vendler et al. established how the greater social dimension in
Heaney’s career has vexed the bucolic with the political (SH notes this “dangerous intersection” in
citing Conor Cruise O’Brien); and it has been a touchstone for other critics to rehearse how the poet
has refused temptation into a more overt discourse on the Troubles. Indeed, the tone has been
taken to suggest that there was a lack of commitment in Heaney to choosing a side to history, and,
in a nearly twenty-five-year-old reading of the above poem, I myself chided Heaney for his stance, or
lack thereof, and will discuss—as conclusion to this now expanded understanding of the poet—how I
read an earlier version of this paper, with Heaney in the audience, and how the poet’s generous
presence and warm wave of acknowledgment at the conclusion to the paper I now remember as a
gesture that urged the me to return to the premises and test them against the facts.
Professor: Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação
Assistant Professor at Federal University of Bahia – Brazil
vivianeannunciacao@hotmail.com
S E AM U S H E A N E Y ’ S S T A T I ON I S L AN D : T H E P OL Y P H ONI C P O E T I CS
OF
E XI L E
The aim of this paper is to analyse the poem “Station Island” (Station Island, 1984) by the
poet Seamus Heaney as a ‘polyphonic poetics of exile’. Heaney’s oeuvre is impregnated with
a poetic style that combines the geographical act of frontier crossing and the linguistic work
with cultural translation. Having migrated from the North to the South of Ireland, and often,
to the United Kingdom and the United States, his poetry represents the distresses of departure
as a continuous search for a translational mode. This is seen not only in his constant work
with tradition, but also in the literal appropriation of literary voices in a poetic heteroglossia.
This technique is observed in the long poem “Station Island” in which his subjective voice
assumes different personae with whom he establishes a mythic dialogue verbalizing, then, his
personal anguish of leaving Northern Ireland at the onset of the Troubles in 1972.
Rui Carvalho Homem
Universidade do Porto, Portugal
rchomem@netcabo.pt
On authorship and intermediality in Seamus Heaney: ‘I can connect / Some
bits and pieces’
This paper aims to extend our understanding of the role that intermediality can play in processes of
identity formation, with a particular bearing on the construction of authorship in the poetry of
Seamus Heaney.
Heaney’s work offers several intriguing examples of the imaginative empowerment afforded
by medial encounters (such as those that involve texts and images), with a particular impact on selfrepresentation. In ‘Vitruviana’ he retrieves an early seaside memory to refract (half-tongue-in-cheek)
a remembered posture of his youthful self through a key image in European culture, Leonardo’s
‘Vitruvian man’. The poet’s awareness of the potential crassness in his verbal appropriation of the
most emblematic Renaissance representation of human centrality, or ‘man as a measure of all
things,’ comes through also in his ekphrastic rendering of another and possibly antithetical visual
foregrounding of the human, Giotto’s Stigmatization of St Francis. In yet another case, the poet
interrogates the tension between lyrical self-representation and a visual ‘version’ of himself in the
form of a portrait reproduced on the back cover of one of his collections – a piece that highlights the
agon between text and image as regards their ability to represent a selfhood. My paper will offer a
discussion of such medial transits, involving Heaney’s verbal representations of his formative
experience and key visual artefacts in the European cultural memory, in order to tease out the
challenges (and opportunities) that intermediality can bring to a delineation of authorial identity.
Li Chengjian
School of Foreign Languages,
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
lichengjian623@hotmail.com
On Seamus Heaney Study in China
Proposal:
My speech is to cover two aspects: to recall my short stay in Heaney Center and to make a
survey of Seamus Heaney Study in China.
Abstract:
Seamus Heaney was first introduced into mainland China in 1987. In the following 26 years,
works introduction and academic studies on Heaney have been deepening and widening in
China. Heaney is well-known as a great poet, a translator and a dramatist, being famous for
his retrospection of Irish history and persistent pursuit for cultural identity. In addition,
Heaney’s fame has been widely spread and publicized by such Medias as newspaper and
internet in the context of the rapid development of Sino-Irish relationship in politics,
economics and culture exchange. Heaney turns up to be an advertisement for Irish national
literature and tourism in a public eye.
Catriona Clutterbuck,
University College Dublin,
Catriona.Clutterbuck@ucd.ie
Being ‘pilot and stray in one’: Sustaining Nothingness in the Travel Poems of Early Heaney
This paper explores how Heaney comes to terms with the ethical challenge of nothingness –
understood in terms of evacuated or disintegrating identity, limits and knowing - in poems from the
1960s and 70s in which travel motifs or motifs of geographical distance and proximity, are central.
The paper argues that nothingness is the correlative (not the opposite) of boundlessness in Heaney’s
thought: nothingness paradoxically anchors even as it interrogates his idea of creative freedom. The
celebration of boundlessness as a keynote of this poet’s aesthetic, is usually associated with the later
rather than the earlier Heaney. The critical code for this boundlessness – the idea that the poet’s
focus shifted definitively away from embracing the earth towards releasing himself as air-borne
somewhere around the mid-1980s - has become a reductive truism insofar as it neglects the
challenge of nothingness as subtending and supporting such lift-off. (This is the case,
notwithstanding the fact that nothingness is far more directly apparent in the poetry of the last
decade of Heaney’s life where mortality and participative anonymity become core concerns. )
However, early poems using travel motifs like ‘The Peninsula’, ‘Funeral Rites’ and ‘Oysters’, establish
the core questions in Heaney’s career-long investigation of the value of nothingness in mediating the
relationships between containment and expansion, definition and indeterminism, order and
disorder, possession and dispossession, belonging and alienation, the ordinary and the
extraordinary , and faith and doubt in his work.
Dr. Brendan Corcoran
Indiana State University
brendan.corcoran@indstate.edu
“Seamus Heaney’s Cured Wound”
Abstract:
This paper addresses Seamus Heaney persistent work as an elegist. It explores the manner in
which Heaney’s elegiac practice specifically conserves death as a “cured wound” in the space of
poetry, paradoxically making death come alive as a constitutive force in the lyric.1 The paper
addresses poems ranging from the bog body poems of North to the later self-elegaic
manifestations of The Tollund Man (Redivivus?) in “District and Circle” and “The Tollund Man
in Springtime,” but it focuses on the the various ways the elegiac is utilized and theorized
throughout Human Chain. So much of Heaney’s poetry, from early to late, explores what remains
in the aftermath of loss: the wound in the mind or in the artifactual remainder of “what
happens”—poetry itself.2 I study Heaney’s modeling of the tension between the elegy’s own
compensatory strategies, which hold out the prospect of healing such wounds, and the genre’s,
like the art form’s, inscription of loss into the world, its fixing of loss (both raw and moderated)
in time. Like his great exemplars Yeats, Hardy, Hughes, or Milosz, Heaney’s repeated efforts to
apprehend human life in extremis produce poetry that testifies to the difficult conjunction of
“beauty and atrocity” within the space of poetry.3 Central to this paper’s thinking about Heaney’s
elegiac poetics is the notion that specifically at this conjunction of the cure and the wound, we
find Heaney’s persistent (if persistently challenged) faith in poetry’s capacity as an ultimately
marvelous, healing art—an art that heals not in any cloying manner but in a way that forcefully
(and even brutally) affirms the fundamental worth of human experience and resistance to the
ebb tide of mortality itself.
Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 110.
Heaney, Opened Ground 173.
3
Heaney, Opened Ground 111.
1
2
Patricia Craig
patricia.craig7@btinternet.com
Station Island Revisited
Seamus Heaney has described his “Station Island” sequence as “an examination of
conscience”. The phrase was current during his Catholic upbringing, trotted out as the
prelude to the making of an actual confession, on one knees before a priest; but it is given a
much wider application here. The religious dimension of the “examination of conscience” is
recast in secular terms, with historical, literary, political, personal, even topographical
undercurrents all making for an illuminating and invigorating approach. Catholicism is an
inheritance but not a guideline - the guidelines here allow for complexity and dissent. In the
course of the sequence a lot of things are crystallised and resolved, including unsettling
pressures such as the pressure to conform to a tribal imperative. As Heaney’s friend Karl
Miller put it in one of his essays, “There are many ways for a poet to be political ...”, some
more overt than others.
“Station Island’, Lough Derg, is not a religious poem, and you certainly can’t call it
“confessional” either: it is far too subtle, resonant and allusive to fall into the “tell all”
category. Its antecedents are well known and include the Eliot of “Little Gidding” with its
“familiar compound ghost” - and of course Dante, though as Heaney says, both hell and
heaven are missing from the sequence, leaving just purgatory. St Patrick’s Purgatory, to be
precise, on the island in Lough Derg which has drawn pilgrims from the twelfth century on.
The poem can be read in different ways - as an assertion of ancestral affinities, an
acknowledgement of a kind of continuity, a declaration of independence, a summoning up
of dead “fosterers” - Heaney’s word - a hesitant apologia (not apology), a rich interfusion of
evocation, individuality and authenticity. (It might be interesting to consider responses to
the poem on its first appearance; its importance was generally recognised.)
Dr Adam Crothers
St John’s College, Cambridge
ac405@cam.ac.uk
‘Darkness echoing’:
In/di/visible rhyming in Heaney and Hill
‘I rhyme | To see myself, to set the darkness echoing’: the final sentence of Seamus
Heaney’s first collection is pleasant to quote, and might inspire good work from poets
writing in Heaney’s wake. But to what extent is the attitude actually evident in
Heaney’s poetry? Assuming that ‘to rhyme’ is to write rhyming poems rather than to
write verse more broadly, how often does Heaney’s rhyming enable or enforce
selfexamination and echoes in the dark; and when Heaney does not rhyme, is there a
suggestion that the self is not being examined, and that the darkness is left silent?
The aim of this paper is to suggest a few things about how rhyme behaves in
Heaney’s writing, where rather than a guiding principle in its own right (as in Paul
Muldoon’s poetry) it is a device whose employment is subject to poem-specific
inclinations. Andrew Osborn has suggested that Heaney's half rhyme is suggestive of
both that which has been weathered, worn down, and that which has weathered,
survived, and I will consider what is gained or lost in Heaney’s favouring rhyme’s
conclusive, clinching power over its generative, discomfiting potential.
This will involve discussing the rhyming of such compositions as ‘Antaeus’ from
North and ‘The Toome Road’ from Field Work, and the poems of Human Chain; by way
of comparison I will look at Geoffrey Hill's recent return to explicitly self-conscious
rhyming, and how this develops what an earlier poem calls ‘fictive consonance’. As
A.V.C. Schmidt gave the title ‘Darkness Echoing’ to a 1985 essay on mythopoeia in
Heaney and Hill, I will address some of that piece’s concerns in my paper, all while
wondering if it matters, to Heaney’s poetry or to his legacy, that ‘hope and history’ do
not, in fact, rhyme.
Grzegorz Czemiel, PhD
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (Lublin, Poland)
czemiel@o2.pl
‘Where does spirit live?’ Seeing Things in the light of object-oriented ontology
Seamus Heaney’s predilection for metaphysics, which he expresses in the
collection Seeing Things, finds an unexpected ally in the form of Graham Harman,
founder of the metaphysical movement referred to as object-oriented philosophy.
Taking cue from his works, I would like to propose an original interpretation of Seeing
Things from the perspective of Harman’s ‘speculative realism.’
Graham Harman furthers Martin Heidegger’s tool-analysis and the category of
presence-at-hand to argue that broadly understood ‘objects’ are always ‘lurking
beneath their outward effects, but they are also something real that cannot be
decomposed into tinier fragments.’ Thus, he proposes an ontology in which all things
retain distinctive essences that are nevertheless finite and only indirectly accessible.
Consequently, relishing the mutability of surface reality, the American philosopher also
invites us to ‘look for the soul of the thing.’
This approach corresponds in many ways with what we encounter in Seeing
Things. Heaney also seems to be concerned with the ‘ground of being.’ Fathoming
various depths (like the iconic bog), he arrives at metaphysical conclusions like ‘the
stone’s alive with what’s invisible,’ which confirm Harman’s thesis that we have no
access to real objects. On the other hand, Heaney immerses himself in ‘shifting
brilliancies’ and ardently studies the surface of all things material, discovering – as in
the case of the pitchfork or the bike – the inexhaustible nature of things. Thus, he
ultimately reconciles the deep and the shallow (‘Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed
be highs!’).
Therefore, Heaney’s ‘squarings’ with reality, whose dazzling effect originates in trying
to ‘be literal a moment,’ approximate Harman’s ‘weird realism,’ ultimately redefining
the notion of ‘realist’ literature and steering clear of philosophical trench wars between
scientism and humanism.
Joan Dargan
St. Lawrence University
jdargan@stlawu.edu
SEAMUS HEANEY : THE GREAT WAR AND BOUNDS OF HISTORY
AND SPEECH
This paper will look at Seamus Heaney’s appreciation of The Sleeping Lord by David Jones,
his poem « In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge » and introduction to Ledwidge’s Selected
Poems, and « In a Field, » the poem written last year in reponse to Edward Thomas’s « As
the Team’s Head Brass » and published in the anthology 1914 : Poetry Remembers. The
great imaginative sympathy characterizing these works by Heaney no doubt springs in part
from the influence of his early memories of soldiers training for the Normandy landings near
his childhood home and from a sense of kinship with his three subjects who communicate a
deeply felt reverence for the land.
Consistent with other of his excavations, Heaney brings past and present into single focus,
makes them immediate, without fanfare. Unlike Jones, he does not weave different temporal
and geographic strands in and around an expanding, or even exploding, framework ; the
influence of Modernism is discreet. Heaney explores the ironies inherent in Ledwidge’s
donning of his « Tommy’s uniform » with delicacy and pays him the tribute of
circumspection, declining to assign meaning to his death, a form of respect extended
implicitly to Thomas as well. And Heaney’s poem « In a Field » achieves a wholly
astonishing effect of surprise, and reversion to silence, a dark recasting of the triumph of the
wind in « Postcript », as he translates the shock of the encounter at war’s end of two
incompatible worlds of experience that somehow must meet the requirement of coexistence.
This exemplary poet subtly brings us again and again to the brink where speech and
speechlessness meet in the attempt to grasp time’s claims on us and begin to flow together.
LeeAnn Derdeyn
University of Texas at Dallas
LeeAnn.Derdeyn@utdallas.edu
Proposal for “Heaney and America” panel
“Opened Ground: Ireland and America. The Rural Roots of Seamus Heaney and Christian Wiman”
I wish to propose a paper that examines Seamus Heaney as a rural poet of Ireland in juxtaposition
and context with a rural poet of America, Christian Wiman, recent editor of Poetry Magazine.
There are many aesthetic congruences within the work of Heaney and Wiman. Both poets began
their careers writing about what they knew: the land, crops, water sources, the wildlife that
frequented the land and water sources, and the oddities of the human wildlife that populated the
rural landscape. They both wrote of things commonplace to a population of ‘countryfolk.’ What
Heaney knew was a forge, the dying art of a smith or bog harvests, his mother’s gardening or food
preparation. Wiman’s door in the dark was to a well house or a storm cellar. His grandmother and
great-aunt were practicing the dying agrarian arts of cotton picking, or canning vegetables,
preserving fruit. Both poets spoke of the strangeness of modernity’s invasions—the trains,
telephone lines, electrical poles hyphenating the landscape. Both poets refused the pastoral in their
experiences and admitted violence resonant in their soundscapes. Both poets wrote formally,
became interested in the classics, began writing non-fictively about their craft, undertook
translations as interactions with foreign poets. Both Heaney and Wiman became cosmopolitans,
travelers conversant with urban words and ways; and yet, the two poets commingled the foreign
with the native, the new and the old, in their art in ways that never severed their cultural roots.
This consideration of Heaney and Wiman as rural poets will suggest fruitful new ways of considering
how poetry opens dialogs across borders, intimates shared experiences, and forges communalities.
Plus, it will be fun, rewarding, and intriguing to conjointly delve into the works of two consummate
craftsmen.
Anne Devlin
anne.devlin1@virgin.net
Heaney and the mantle of Aeschylus: the aftermath of the war.
The most dramatic opening moments in Western Theatre Literature is the scanning of the dark for
the fire. It is given to the voice of the Watch at the start of Aeschylus’ great trilogy The Oresteia,
about the aftermath of the Trojan War. It is this moment Heaney takes for his 1998 dramatic
monologue: Mycenae Lookout in The Spirit Level. This paper argues that in 1998 when he found
himself in Greece receiving news of his Noble Prize Heaney found the confidence to experiment
further with the dramatic monologue ( which he uses to great effect in much of his poetry) when he
chooses this dramatic form he found himself at the end of his own Watch on the hillside. For
Aeschylus the eruption or arrival of the flame marks the end of the Watch’s involvement with us in
the first play of the trilogy: the death of Agamemnon. In Heaney’s version the sighting of the flame is
connected with a call or calling. So the poet chooses to chart the aftermath from the persona of the
Watch; in fact he collapses the dialogue and condenses the entire first play into five short
monologues. The most recent production of the Oresteia was by the poet Ted Hughes which opened
at the National in 1999, one year after Heaney’s monologue. It took three days to perform. In
Stepping Stones Heaney comments on his friend’s achievement when he says:` I think Hughes was
closer to the shaman than the senate. ‘ This paper argues in fact that the Shaman was what Heaney
made of the Watch in Mycenae Lookout. And that this dimension ( the possession of the character
by what he is witnessing) becomes clear when the dramatic monologue is read aloud, when an
embodiment occurs ; precisely a comment on the trauma of aftermath. Should we regret that
Heaney did not sustain his engagement with the mantle of Aeschylus, but instead continued his
exploration of the political realities of the aftermath through the work of Sophocles?
Stephen Enniss, Director
The University of Texas at Austin
enniss@austin.utexas.edu
Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Poetic Acts of Self-Definition
"What Seamus Heaney has done for the rural hinterland of Ulster, Mahon does for the
shipyards and backstreets,” Michael Longley wrote in 1968. Seamus Heaney was closely
associated with Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, and in their early years the three poets
defined their poetic identities in relation to one another. The friends confided their poetic
ambitions to one another, laid claim to competing Irish traditions, toured together, and shared
stages and radio broadcasts. Inevitably they conceived their work in relation to the other. In
all of these ways and more, Heaney and Mahon crafted individual talents with a high degree
of consciousness of the other. I will draw upon my forthcoming biography of Derek Mahon
to illuminate these connections and tensions. I will examine the terms Heaney and Mahon
chose for their own self-presentation in the 1960s and 1970s (the years of most frequent
contact) and the way in which these acts of self definition were part of a persistent poetic
dialogue with its own inherent dependencies and need.
Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at
Austin. He did his undergraduate studies at Davidson College, followed by a library degree
from Emory University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia. He
previously served as Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and, before
that, Director of Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. While at
Emory he was responsible for many major acquisitions, among them the archives Seamus
Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. He is currently completing a biography After
the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon.
Dr Andrew Fitzsimons
Gakushuin University,
Tokyo
ayfitzs@parkcity.ne.jp
Mundus et Infans: After-time and the Child in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
In a colloquium on the work of Czeslaw Milosz held in April 1998, Seamus Heaney elucidates the
importance to him of the particular form of perspective found in Milosz’s poem ‘The World’, and,
quoting from the section ‘From the Window’, reads in terms that allude to the ambitions of his own
work. The poem, he says, is ‘binocular, seeing things from the top of the high mountain and from the
back of the child’s eye’. This mode of vision is deliberate on Milosz’s part and evokes for Heaney
another deliberate ‘poetic strategy’, that of Virgil’s Eclogues’ in which, he says, ‘the Roman poet sees
the hard social and political realities of Augustus’s Italy through eyes that had once opened innocently
on the childhood world of his father’s farm’. That Heaney’s reading of Milosz and Virgil has
implications for his own poetic strategies and practice is obvious, but what I would like to do in this
paper is pair the exacerbated, extreme perspective invoked here by Heaney with another no less
relevant form of double perspective, again in the context of the world and the child, that of ‘the aftertime’ introduced at the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the anticipated perspective through
which event will come to be pictured. I hope to show how central this form of anticipated perspective
is in Heaney, from Death of a Naturalist to Human Chain, and how awareness of this centrality has
implications not only for our understanding of how his work relates to poetic antecedents such as
Wordsworth and Frost, but also for the debates concerning the apparent conservatism of Heaney’s
lyric voice.
Toshi Furomoto
Kobe Univ. in Japan (retired)
furomoto@bcb.bai.ne.jp
Strongly Spent is Kept --
Tradition of Generosity (Summary)
In many obituaries we read how generous Heaney was in every way. From three
different private occasions I have had the same experience and confirmed my impression
that it is an indispensable quality of an excellent teacher to be ready to respond
the student’s necessity. Heaney was frank to admit how exhaustive it is to run
a work shop of poetry, but it seemed a greater joy for him to satisfy the expectation
from students and audience. Here we can find a man who loves talking about the truth
as exactly as possible.
On one occasion of his favor Heaney gave me an anthology with an inscription quoted
from Robert Frost. ‘Strongly spent is kept.’ Frost a great poet-teacher provided Heaney
an example to show the dual nature of that critical position as ‘appreciator’ and ‘adjudicator’.
Heaney the poet must have been aware of the importance of the role of critic and educator
to promulgate the cause of poetry perse and its social responsibility.
And another function of the poet-teacher is to bridge the two orders of mystery and
common sense; in a larger sense it can be to mediate two conflicting elements in society.
The ‘appease’ or ‘exacerbate’ are one of the significant pairs in Heaney’s critical ideas.
That function of an excellent teacher-poet is a sort of go-between to connect the creation
and appreciation. The teacher is expected to read carefully, think intensely, and to explicate
persuasively. Thus the poet-critic bridges the two orders, the practical and the poetic.
the utilitarian and the aesthetic. And the words used for the first order are social and
functional and the other authentic and private. And the ability to talk the mystery of
the private world in socially creditable terms is echoing W.H.Auden on Yeats, strength and
clarity.
Dr. Barbara Gerner de García
Gallaudet University
Barbara.gerner.de.garcia@gallaudet.edu
Heaney in Translation: The written word transformed by sign language
In his Nobel lecture, Heaney reflected on his childhood in rural County Derry in the 1940’s as a “preliterate” time for him. The radio transported him on his “journey into the wideness of the world.
This, in turn, became a journey into the wideness of language.” Seamus Heaney was a gifted
translator as well as a poet, and his poetry unsurprisingly has been translated into many languages.
Languages that Heaney may not have considered are the sign languages of deaf people. Sign
languages use the movement of hands and body, and facial expressions to convey meaning. They are
natural languages with their own grammars, and are independent of the spoken language(s) in their
environments. English is the common spoken language in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland,
and the United States yet there are three different sign languages – American Sign Language (ASL),
British Sign Language (BSL) and Irish Sign Language (ISL). As of 2004, both BSL and ISL are recognized
as official languages in Northern Ireland.
I have taught Heaney poems in an undergraduate course on Irish culture at a university for deaf
students in the United States. Poetry in spoken/written languages is experienced through reading
and listening. While my students read English, translating poems into ASL reveals the emotion and
meaning they contain. Rather than a word for word translation, a sign language translation creates a
visual representation that conveys the poem’s meaning.
In this presentation, I will show a videotaped translation by deaf students of a Heaney poem into
ASL. I will describe the process of translating, including the use and meaning of visual imagery,
cinematic techniques, and discuss the idea that translation into a visual/gestural language, while
transformative of the form, conveys the poet’s intent.
Donald Givans
The University of Aberdeen
r01dgg13@abdn.ac.uk
Old Axles and Iron Hoops: Seamus Heaney and the Conflicted Sonnet
My paper explores the sonnet in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, considering Heaney’s sonnets as
renegotiations of formal conventions and literary precedents, and addressing the politics of form
within Irish and British lyric traditions. Drawing on various sonnets, sonnet-sequences, and relevant
material, I will present a dialogic approach to Heaney’s experimentation with the sonnet form.
Individual poems such as “Gone”, “The Forge”, “Requiem for the Croppies”, and “Out of Shot”, will
be considered comparatively, with reference to the sonnet-sequences of “Act of Union”, “Glanmore
Sonnets”, and “Clearances”. “The Forge”, with its ‘old axles and iron hoops’ – the bearings around
which wheels turn and bindings within which contents are contained – provides an early example of
Heaney’s “conflicted” sonnetry. The ‘short-pitched ring’ of poetic inspiration, the ‘unpredictable
fantail of sparks’ that makes a poem, suggests that what is assumed of the sonnet from the ‘Outside’
– the reader’s perspective – the “predictable” volta, octave and sestet that turn and bind, are from
the ‘Inside’ – the maker’s perspective – not yet ‘hammered’ into shape. In “The Forge” a Petrarchan,
or Italian sonnet-structure, suggested by the rhymes of the octave, turns to ‘clatter’ in the irregularly
of the sestet-rhymes. Heaney’s experimentation is furthered and deepened when he ‘expends
himself in shape and music’ reworking the sonnet’s formal and thematic conventions to explore Irish
and British exchanges. Discussing the composition of “Glanmore Sonnets” (III), Heaney described his
unease with ‘the melodious grace of the English iambic line’, that it was a ‘kind of affront, that it
needed to be wrecked’. This Shakespearean, or English sonnet, uneasily rhyming ‘corncrake’ with
‘iambic’, is another example of a form that, in Heaney’s hands, both ‘Refreshes and relents’.
Stephen Grace
University of York
swg500@york.ac.uk
‘anglings, aimings, feints and squints’: Heaney’s sense of space.
In spite of a strong feeling for histories of all kinds Seamus Heaney was, as Bernhard Klein has
noted, ‘more interested in space than in time’4, and often converted the later into the former,
most famously in his bog poems. Conceptualised by Heaney himself as ‘the memory of the
landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it’5, and
represented by the short, four lined consonantal stanzas that populate much of Wintering
Out (1972) and North (1975), the bog remains, for many critics, Heaney’s stand out
achievement.
However, as Klein also observes, this inerasable memory ‘privileges
preservation over change’ and after 1975’s North Heaney’s poetry ‘is frequently set in a selfconsciously liminal, intermediary or transitional location, far away from the bog: the beach,
strand or coast’6. This paper will consider Heaney’s sonnets, and the twelve-line form of his
‘Squarings’ sequence (1991), as instances of such ‘transitional’ spaces, and examine how
these forms develop out of their antecedents: the sonnet from the bog-poem, the twelveliner from the sonnet. By tracing the evolution of Heaney’s forms out of the bog’s restrictive
stanzas and into, initially, the longer, agricultural rhythms of the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ and
then, more radically in ‘Clearances’ and ‘Squarings’, into what Helen Vendler has called ‘a
poetics of “airy listening”’7, I will argue that Heaney’s most comprehensive sense of space
does not lie in the static bog, but in ‘those anglings, aimings, feints and squints’8 he uses to
define the term ‘Squarings’, and that it is in these improvised, ephemeral moments, no less
real than the bog for being less physically present, indeed in some respects more real for
being less physically present, that his most enduring legacy lies.
4
On the Uses of History in Recent Irish Writing, (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2007), p. 133
5
6
Preoccupations, (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 54
Ibid. 139
7
Souls Says: On Recent Poetry, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p.
207
8
Seeing Things, (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 57
Sammye C. Greer, Professor Emerita
Wittenberg University
sgreer2@woh.rr.com
“The Sharping Stone” and an Elegiac Consolation for our Time
The relation of Seamus Heaney’s elegies to traditional elegiac poetry is the subject of discussion in
several critical works. For example, Jahan Ramazani asserts that “[w]hile questioning, analyzing, and
even attacking the elegy’s major subgenres and conventions, Heaney . . . energetically reclaims them
for our time” (337); and Stephen Regan raises a fundamental question: “How can the mythic
structures and traditional sources of consolation inherent in the [elegiac] genre continue to function
in an age of skepticism and disbelief?” (19).
“The Sharping Stone” serves as a touchstone for both of these observations by exhibiting Heaney’s
appropriation of various structures and conventions of the classical and the English elegy. This paper
concentrates on Heaney’s transformation of one of these components of the genre, the consolation,
which he distinguished by indirection, inversion, paradox and irony as well as by an affirmation of
what he calls in The Redress of Poetry “ a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is
denied or constantly threatened by circumstances” (4). He arrives at this consoling principle through
a dialectical presentation – in the second and third parts of the poem – of an over-arching trope, the
description of two recumbent couples, one experiencing an ecstatic moment in one of Ireland’s
forest parks, the other, long dead but represented in a moment of marital bliss by the sculpture on
the lid of a sarcophagus. By considering the relation between these two scenes and the thematic
dialectic between the two stanzas, the paper calls attention to one of Heaney’s most significant
achievements within the genre.
Works Cited
Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996.
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Reagan, Stephen. “Seamus Heaney and the Modern Irish Elegy.” Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic,
Translator. Ed. Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 925.
Dr Gillian Groszewski,
Trinity College, Dublin
ggroszew@tcd.ie
‘The Politics of Friendship’: Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney
The friendship between Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney has been considered by several
critics in brief comparisons of their work and is the subject of a recent overview essay by Henry
Hart (2012). Apart from dwelling on the poets’ comparable poetic representations of the
natural world and Heaney’s early indebtedness to Hughes as an influence, however, critics
have failed to consider the ways in which Hughes’s and Heaney’s friendship affected their
poetry in any great detail. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship
(1997) and Heaney’s essay on Hughes, ‘Englands of the Mind’ (1976), this paper will examine
the ‘politics of friendship’ in the poetry of Hughes and Heaney suggesting this approach as an
interesting new way to consider their influence on one another.
Following his appointment to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, Hughes claimed that
Heaney would be ‘the first successful advocate, in England, for Ireland’s side of all the cases’
(Letters of Ted Hughes 565). Through readings of Hughes’s Laureate poems and Heaney’s
North (1976), this paper looks at how both poets dealt with the question of nationalism in
their work but from two opposite ends of a very complex Anglo-Irish political spectrum.
Drawing on archival work, the paper then explores Hughes’s influence on Heaney’s Electric
Light (2001) through a consideration of Heaney’s ‘Red, White and Blue’, a poem that was
directly inspired by Heaney’s reading of Hughes’s Birthday Letters in manuscript. From
‘Englands of the Mind’ and North to ‘Red, White and Blue’ and Birthday Letters, this paper
traces the political subtext discernible in writings by Hughes and Heaney that were inspired
by one another suggesting that close consideration of this subtext is vital to understanding
both the writing and the friendship.
Dr Adam Hanna
University of Aberdeen
adam.hanna@abdn.ac.uk
Seamus Heaney’s Uncertainty at the Threshold
The farmhouse at Mossbawn in which Seamus Heaney spent his childhood was, in his
imagination, at once a firmly-bounded familial shelter and a site of interplay and engagement
with the world beyond it. In this paper I explore the moments in his poetry when the threshold
of this family farm is approached by three ambiguous embodiments of both friendship and
potentially-hostile power: one neighbour (a powerfully ambiguous word in Heaney’s lexicon)
who is a demobbed soldier; a second who is an evangelical member of Northern Ireland’s
Protestant majority; and a third who is the son of a member of the security forces. In my paper
I will examine both the house’s occupants and the neighbours who visit them as they all hesitate
at the threshold.
I will relate Heaney’s preoccupation with images of the political and religious Other at the
house’s limits to his conflicted stance towards the Northern Ireland of his time. The hesitations
which are such a prominent feature of these liminal encounters are closely linked, I argue, to
Heaney’s internal debates about what he was prepared to include in his poetry; about the limits
of his own sympathies and identifications; and about the extent to which accommodative or
resistant impulses should guide him in his writing. I identify in Heaney’s work a prominent
strand of self-questioning as to the correct stance to take in relation to wider Northern Irish
politics – one which acknowledges the intimacy that exists alongside enmity. By laying the
emphasis on moments of uncertainty in Heaney’s poems I wish to suggest new ways of thinking
about the politics that underlie them.
Margaret Mills Harper
University of Limerick
margaret.harper@ul.ie
Elementals in Language
Heaney's abiding interest in states that might be called (following medieval science)
elements might help to explain his poetics. Throughout his oeuvre, states of solidity or
liquidity, the conditions of earth, water, and air, show themselves again and again. Such
states are present in imagery and topics in any number of poems, and also evoked in
structures from etymology to sound to form. I suspect Heaney felt that poetry, a flexible
instrument that can turn language into something both fixed and seemingly light or moving,
could do something almost alchemical, or alchemical in reverse—by which I mean that he
felt a poem can turn something that is not elemental into something that is, that ironically
can ground or move its readers, as if it is wind or water or even fire. The question is, what
does it mean, exactly, when we say that language can be solid or or light? I will look into
what creates a sense of the elemental, the things themselves, in Heaney's changing poetics,
examining what he might have been straining towards using this concept as a guide.
Hugh Haughton
University of York
hugh.haughton@york.ac.uk
‘Seamus Heaney: First and Last Things’
In ‘Mint’, Heaney says that ‘My last things will be the first things slipping from me.’ Heaney is
remembered above all as a mnemonic poet of concrete things, in particular first things and
early memories, as in poems like ‘Digging’ and ‘Personal Helicon’. In this paper, however, I
want to look at Heaney as a poet of ‘last things’ and at late returnings to first things. As part
of an ongoing study of the literature of screen memory, I want to look back from the end of
Heaney’s career and engage with – or seek to gage – the nature of the poet’s later poetics of
memory, focusing on poems such as ‘A Sofa in the Forties’ and ‘In the Attic’. Drawing on
what Michael Rothberg calls ‘multi-directional memory’, I want to dwell on Heaney’s last
book The Human Chain, with its distinctive late take on earliness and lateness, looking at its
representations of the past in terms of larger notions of the relationship between the
personal and cultural memory banks.
Dr Tom Herron
Leeds Metropolitan University
t.herron@leedsmet.ac.uk
Heaney’s handmades: poetry, objects, things
W
hen Jacques Derrida writes of Francis Ponge, ‘and so he loves the proper: what is proper to himself,
proper to the other, proper, that is, to the always singular thing’, he might as easily have been
speaking of Seamus Heaney whose poetry frequently invokes objects – often agricultural or
domestic implements produced by hand and at a certain remove from the capitalist mode of massproduction – with sufficient intensity to transform them into singular things. As opposed to the quotidian
object that remains largely unconsidered and almost entirely unwritten, the ‘thing’ wrenched from
anonymity resonates with an intensity produced by the linguistic, rhythmic, and formal properties of the
poem so that we ‘return’ to (a sense of) the originary object now supplemented by this new thing: the
poem itself. This is not simply a matter of ‘making strange’: it is in fact the enunciation of a demand that
is, according to Derrida, unequivocally ethical. To respond to the demand mobilized by the poet is to
entertain the possibility of attending to the absolute other (the object/thing), both in its own right and in
terms of the cultural milieu of which it is an expression.
This paper addresses the ‘becoming’ or the ‘becoming-thing’ of Heaney’s poetry of objects. Taking
objects familiar in his work – spade, trowel, hammer – I discuss how through a sustained act of attention,
the summoned object becomes a singular thing possessing auratic qualities while at the same time being
an artefact-trace of an era of cultural production reliant on manual modes of production in which the
hand was central. In place of figuration, Heaney’s encounter with the object/thing is more likely to be
haptic, a perception that produces effects of steadying or grounding bound up precisely in the sense of
facticity and cultural solidarity enunciated by the newly-forged poetic object/thing.
Geraldine Higgins
Emory University
ghiggin@emory.edu
“Exhibiting Heaney”
In February 2014, Emory will launch the first major exhibition on Seamus Heaney, long
planned before his untimely death in August 2013. Seamus Heaney: The Music of What
Happens focuses on the particular strengths of the library’s Heaney collection and follows the
trajectory of Heaney’s work from the earth-bound bog poems of his early career to the
lightness and airiness of “crediting marvels” in his later work. Heaney had an enduring
connection to Emory that can be traced back over thirty years from his first visit in 1981,
through the inaugural Ellmann lectures in 1988 to classroom visits and poetry readings. His
last visit to Emory was in March 2013. The Music of What Happens celebrates the music of
Heaney’s words, his love of family and homeplace, his commitment to friends and fellowwriters, his political engagement with civil rights and human rights and his status as a
beloved public figure.
This paper reflects on the experience of curating the exhibition as well as the geography of
the archive and the politics of place.
Mr James Holland
Headmaster (retired)
jimholland841@btinternet.com
Heaney Word Alchemist
Awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, a recognition of Seamus Heaney's
genius in rendering French poetry into magisterial language is paramount. Central to my
proposal is to draw attention to "A Herbal" showing how Heaney had made this poem his
own in comparison with "Herbier de Bretagne" written by Guillevic. Without any knowledge of
this version, which due to the work being written in French may not be accessible to the
general reader, what is happening in Heaney's oeuvre may be difficult to appreciate. Indeed
I would contend that to consider "A Herbal" as merely a poem about herbs is to misconstrue
the meaning and intention entirely.
This would allow me to compare it with Yeats' "When you are old and grey" which is an
adaptation from Ronsard's poem of 1575 "Quand vous serez bien vielle, au soir, à la
chandelle" and which was of course a chef d'oeuvre by comparison. To give but one
example, what in Guillevic are snakes found under the ferns, "Sous les fougères/Se tenaient
les vipères" in Heaney becomes "The tail of a rat/We killed". Employing a subtle shift in
language, this image is traduced into something which in English opens up metaphors of
malignant things, "Looked as hard/As you look into yourself/Into the rat hole". Most powerful
of all the images however are undoubtedly those about "the quarrel with ourselves". One
example will suffice: "Yet for all their lush/Compliant dialect/No way have plants here/Arrived
at a settlement." Therefore, I assert that Heaney's poem requires a deeper level of reflection
and insight: the subtle changes in language used such as the snake/rat comparison are so
eloquently adjusted for the reader that they are easily missed but are deeply important to the
significance of the poem itself.
Dr. Florence Impens
Trinity College, Dublin
fimpens@tcd.ie
Seamus Heaney’s Virgil(s): A Return to the Classics
Many times over the course of his poetic career, Seamus Heaney insisted on the
importance that the figure of Virgil had for him, calling him for example his ‘hedgeschoolmaster’ in ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ (Electric Light, 2001). This fascination for the
Latin poet goes back to the 1950s and Heaney’s days at St Columb’s, and it runs
throughout his life, down to his last published collection, Human Chain.
There are many Heaneysian Virgils, as his relationship with his illustrious predecessor
changed over the years. If the poet regularly resurfaced as a guide for Heaney in
distressing times and periods of profound change, he was, until the mid-1980s, a
character borrowed from Dante’s Divine Comedy, rather than the author of the Eclogues
and the Aeneid whom he became in later years.
The paper proposes to focus on that evolution: discussing the texts in which Virgil is
read from a Northern perspective, it closely analyses poems from Field Work and Station
Island, as well as from The Riverbank Field, and shows how Heaney moved from a
Christian representation of the Latin poet to a classical one after 1990. It argues that this
change, heralded by Seeing Things in 1991, where Heaney published his first translation
of the Aeneid, might be interpreted, in an era marked by the peace process in the North
and by the further integration of the island in Europe, as a poetic strategy to
accommodate the diversity of cultural and religious definitions of Ireland. Choosing to
represent a Virgilian North with a classical rather than a Dantean intertext, Heaney
indeed revisits the region from a secular perspective, and the paper will conclude on the
importance that Virgil and more generally, classical intertextuality, has in his work as a
trans-communal and anti-sectarian material.
Joanna Jarząb
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
jjarzab@wa.amu.edu.pl
The ontological “sense of place” in Seamus Heaney’s essays
Henri Lefebvre in The right to the city (1967) advocates the idea of a dialogic nature of space,
especially between the countryside and the city. He also points out to the increasing need for
the holistic study of the city, which denotes going beyond the sociological approach and
looking at the urban space in more universal terms. The call seems to have been answered since
the return to the phenomenological treatment of space is observable in such works as Michel
Foucault’s Of other spaces (1984) or Michel de Certeau’s The practice of everyday life (1984),
just to name the few. In Northern Ireland, such role appears to have been fulfilled by Seamus
Heaney, a poet, but also a critic, who in his essays more often than not approached the topic of
space in a more theoretically. Thus, the following paper aims at looking at Heaney’s essays
with reference to the theme of space perception and representation. The analysis is supposed
to show that the prose writings, apart from serving the purpose of a comment to poetry, in many
instances include an attempt at defining the ontological meaning of place in Heaney’s
contemporary Northern Irish reality. Similarly to Lefebvre, Heaney does not perceive space as
divided into countryside and the city, but rather tries to extract the essence of “the sense of
place” from both of them. Recognising the need, Heaney tries to establish new terms, which
would enable him to express his understanding of space as a concept. Thus, the paper will
devote some scrutiny to the terminology appearing in the essays, such as omphalos or
dinnseanchas, treating it as one of the indicators of the poet’s theoretical inquiry into the topic.
Dr Sharon Jones
Stranmillis University College, Belfast
s.jones@stran.ac.uk
Heaney and Education
Heaney gave a public lecture at the Department of Further Professional Studies in Education at
Queen's University, Belfast, in June 1983, in memory of Northern Irish educationalist, John M.
Malone. At the outset, he appealed to language and its origins to deepen understanding: "The Latin
root of the verb "to educate" is educare, to lead or bring or draw out, and our notions of education
to a large extent centre upon this etymological core... as educators we are leading those being
educated towards themselves, drawing out what is in them, helping them to bring to consciousness
those areas of their being that would otherwise remain terra incognita to them". In Heaney's life and
work we encounter not only "high watermarks of poetry”, to borrow words from his own response
to Yeats's poem Among Schoolchildren, but an expert and nuanced understanding of children and of
learning peculiar to the mind of a great teacher. Drawing on close readings from his poetry and
prose, tribute is paid to Heaney’s remarkable contribution in education, a creative vision in which
poetry and learning are inextricably linked. The “walls of the world expand” as both reader and
writer, teacher and learner, poet and child "go beyond our normal cognitive bounds and sense a new
element where we are not alien but liberated, more alive to ourselves, more drawn out, more
educated". This, we conclude, is timely inspiration for what Heaney termed the “responsible and
influential arts of teaching” today.
Rosie Lavan,
St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
rosamund.lavan@st-annes.ox.ac.uk
Explorations: Seamus Heaney and Education
A professional teacher before he was a professional poet, Seamus Heaney was acutely
conscious of different kinds of learning. This paper will examine ideas about education in
Heaney’s work through Explorations, the radio series which Heaney presented and David
Hammond produced for the BBC Northern Ireland schools service in the 1970s. Despite
recent welcome attention to broadcasting in Ireland and to Heaney’s own radio work,
Explorations has been somewhat neglected. Bringing material from the BBC Northern
Ireland Community Archive into dialogue with Heaney’s own observations on the teaching of
literature throughout his career, this paper seeks to recover the series in its full and plural
significance, finding Heaney in the company of other poets whose broadcasting work
prompted reflective analysis of pedagogy, including T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes.
In considering the interaction between Heaney’s roles as broadcaster and educator the paper
is preoccupied with communication and its contexts, which are broader and deeper than the
immediate circumstances of the production and transmission of Explorations. Mindful of
Heaney’s self-professed progress as a pupil whose education was enabled by the Butler Act,
the paper assesses Heaney’s place in a generation of writers who explored feelings of
displacement from class and community engendered by education. It therefore challenges the
old narrative of the angry young man: such social dislocation has traditionally been a British
affect, but the responses of Heaney, Seamus Deane and others illuminate the unique
circumstances of the northern, Irish Catholic educated in a postwar British system. Fresh
historicist approaches to Heaney’s writing are thus made possible—Richard Hoggart’s
seminal work The Uses of Literacy (1957) anticipates, for example, the awkwardness of
‘Clearances’ 4. By considering Heaney’s professional undertakings beyond the writing of
poetry, approaches to his poetry are valuably renewed.
Ruth Macklin
University of Otago, New Zealand
ruth.macklin@gmail.com
Seamus Heaney: a Conference and Commemoration
Insufficient attention has been paid to the significance and centrality of redress for Heaney’s
work. This might be due to its presentation in The Redress of Poetry where it appears as a
protean idea, though Michael Cavanagh’s formulation of redress as a “troubled, not wholly
consistent ... meditation” elegantly captures Heaney’s preoccupation with the concept
(Cavanagh 2009, ix). This paper argues that redress does not constitute a project of selffashioning or self-definition. It also argues that Heaney’s pseudonym, Incertus, does not
indicate uncertainty in terms of equivocation, something he has been charged with at various
times in his career. Rather, it suggests a characteristic uncertainty of how to create a space for
himself from and within which to write. In his early work in particular, this precursive stage
of writing is indicated by Heaney’s ritual recourse to spatial metaphor. Having arrived at the
place of writing, the process of unwriting is immediately initiated and the space
deconstructed. Space or place are terms which Heaney uses interchangeably in reference both
to internal and external spaces. There is also a temporal aspect to redress, indicated by the
process of writing and unwriting that takes place over the course of Heaney’s career. It is this
deconstruction of the created place and the unwriting of what has been written which, in
Heaney’s words, “makes the renewal of artistic effort contemplatable” (1989, 33-34). And it
is that contemplation which functions as an impetus for poetry. This paper therefore explores
Heaney’s diction, rhetorical strategies, and ritual performance of redress.
Tess Maginess,
Queen’s University, Belfast
t.maginess@qub.ac.uk
To delight and instruct: Heaney and the teaching of poetry
Philip Sidney argued that the chief end of poetry was to delight and instruct. Teaching literature
within the Open Learning Programme at Queen’s University, I have developed a pedagogy for the
teaching of poetry with mature students who testify that it has enabled them to really enjoy what is
arguably the richest and most difficult literary genre. Thus, in this paper, I would like to seek a critical
response to this model to learn how I might improve it.
The pedagogy has been designed to introduce students to poetry using a close reading or textual
approach, incorporating theories such as Feminism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism , Cultural
Materialism and Reader Response theory in a highly embedded way so that students with no
previous experience of ‘High Theory’ are not ‘turned off’ by abstract conceptualization but get
straight ‘into’ the experience of the poem itself.
This ‘close reading’ unpacks the individual poem, often over a two-hour session. Students participate
actively in a line-by line and sometimes word by word analysis, where polyvalent meaning is
explored. Thus the student can appreciate how, for example, pun, simile, metaphor and symbol get
constructed.
The soundscape is analysed, equipping the student with the technical terminology – metre,
assonance, alliteration, rhyme - to appreciate why a poet chooses or eschews certain patterns.
Intertexuality is foregrounded since this is almost inevitable in the self-consciously literary ‘world’ of
the poem. Poems metaphorically about poetry itself is a meta-trope also examined. The poem is
also contextualized within is particular time, place and cultural circumstance.
The paper will demonstrate these pedagogic strategies through offering an example of a close
reading of Heaney’s ‘A Kite for Aibhin’ – a poem which, at the door of his death, delights and
instructs us on what poetry is at its most fine.
Further information, if needed, in addition to abstract.
The poem is the last poem in Heaney’s last published collection, Human Chain. I will argue in my
reading of it that Heaney also teaches us about poetry in the most profound way in this summative
poem which is also a valediction to life and to poetry. Iit is a poem about poetry; a poem built upon a
poem written by the Italian, Pascoli, a poem which refers, alludes to famous poets like Yeats and
which also reprises and recasts phrases and ideas from Heaney’s own oeuvre. And it is a poem about
poetry too, in the way in which it problematises the ancient poetic tension between spirit and body,
between death and life, between art and reality, between separation and belonging, between the
senses and the soul.
From his heavy digging to his self-questioning eelworks to, in the end, a soaring upwards towards a
paradoxical liberation, the poem tells Heaney’s own story as a poet.
Kelly Matthews, Ph.D.
Framingham State University
kmatthews@framingham.edu
“Heaney at Harvard”
During his appointment as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Seamus Heaney
most often taught creative writing workshops in poetry, with a competitive selection process for
aspiring students. Occasionally, however, he also taught lecture courses on modern British and Irish
poetry. His syllabus for “British and Irish Poetry 1930-1990” in the spring of 1992 included a wide
range of poets – English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish – grouped not by nationality but rather by
intuitive connections and a sense of fellow feeling among the poems themselves. Students in the
course read Patrick Kavanagh alongside Stevie Smith, Hugh MacDiarmuid alongside David Jones,
Louis MacNeice alongside Craig Raine.
This course, in which I was fortunate to be enrolled as an undergraduate, introduced students to
poetry by Heaney’s predecessors and contemporaries, and his priorities as a teacher shed light on
his own sources of influence. Throughout his teaching of other poets, Heaney exhorted his students
to consider modern poets’ two major responses to world politics: to transform the ordinary into the
rich and strange, or, as he put it, to be answerable and to be resistant.
John McAuliffe,
University of Manchester
john.mcauliffe@manchester.ac.uk
Seamus Heaney’s England
This paper proposes to look at how England figures in Seamus Heaney’s work, exploring the
continuing applicability of his 1976 essay ‘Englands of the Mind’ to discussions of English
poetry before discussing how his poems subsequently take London (and the London
Underground) as starting points: I will also ask how these English poems register both
closeness and distance, and how their example informs contemporary English poetry.
Faye McDermott
University of Aberdeen
r02fm12@abdn.ac.uk
Traditionally, elegies functioned in order to present a memorial through which the poet could
work through grief in a process which ultimately allowed for consolation. In his study, 'The
English Elegy', Peter Sacks provides a detailed account of the origins of the elegiac mode and
as he describes its development he demonstrates how the compensatory pursuit is one which
naturally permeates the English elegies, from Spenser through to Swinburne. Many modern
elegies retreat from the traditional associations of comfort and consolation in response to the
experience of loss, and rather adopt an approach which both resists such assuaging and which
also subverts and destabilises any rendition of it. In Jahan Ramazani’s study, Poetry of
Mourning, he states that recent elegists tend ‘not to heal but to reopen the wound of loss’.
This paper will examine whether or not Seamus Heaney’s elegies eschew many of the
traditional conventions previously associated with the genre as Sacks traces it, and adopts an
approach more in line with what Ramazani has attributed to many modern elegists, whereby
‘intense criticism and self-criticism’ is demonstrated, along with ‘fierce resistance to solace’.
By addressing grief theories and traditional elegiac conventions, the paper will examine how
Heaney confronts loss within his poetry and ultimately, if his elegies reveal what Sacks
describes as the ‘emphasis on the drama or the “doing”’ of the poem, ensuring a sense of
‘traversing some distance’ which, whether figuratively or psychological, allows for the
Freudian concept of ‘successful mourning’. Elegies including ‘Clearances’ (The Haw
Lantern) and ‘Seeing Things’ (Seeing Things) in memory of his parents will be addressed, as
well as the pastoral ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ (Field Work), in an analysis which will
ultimately assess the extent to which these elegies challenge traditional elegiac resources, and
whether or not they reveal a remedial sense of closure or anti-consolatory outlook overall.
Philip McGowan,
Queen’s University Belfast
Philip.mcgowan@qub.ac.uk
‘Heaney’s Dream Song’
In its 23 December 2013 issue, The New Yorker published one of the last poems written by
Seamus Heaney before he died. Completed on 18 August 2013 and dedicated to his granddaughter Siofra, ‘In Time’ is the last of Heaney's dedicated poems to members of his family;
it is also a notation on notations (musical, personal, generational). Structurally it is a poem
written in a stanzaic form not typical of Heaney’s oeuvre: eighteen lines composed of three 6line stanzas of half-rhymed couplets, it carries its musicality lightly as it unspools its
premonition of a future time beyond the poet’s own life span in which his grand daughter has
grown into adulthood. The closest approximation to this form in Heaney is 'Harvest Bow'
(from North, 1979), though that poem runs across five stanzas. Arguably a closer example is
a poem also originally published by The New Yorker, ‘The Guttural Muse’ from Field
Work (1979), which appeared in its 25 June 1979 issue. Yet, 'The Guttural Muse' consists of
three five- rather than six-line stanzas of loosely associated half-rhymes. Moving outside of
Heaney's own corpus to find a correspondence, 'In Time' resembles the stanzaic form (if not
quite the metrical arrangement) of John Berryman's Dream Songs; moreover, it shares their
revisited interests in music, musical references and notations, as well as the familial/personal
nature of their subject matter. This paper reads 'In Time' as Heaney's take on Berryman's
dream song form, moving forward and back in time, as well as in and out of the musical time
of which it is self-consciously aware.
Professor Kevin Murphy
Ithaca College, New York
murphyk@ithaca.edu
Heaney Translating Heaney
I propose a short talk addressing Seamus Heaney’s use of translation to clarify and, in
another use of that word, to “translate” his own poetic vision, both in his choice of texts from
other languages and in his transposition of those texts “in his own words” to the landscape of
his childhood in County Derry. I am particularly interested in his translations in Human
Chain, both his applications of Book VI of the Aeneid and more especially the partial
translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s “L’aquilone” which concludes the volume. The passages in
Virgil Heaney focuses on concern Aeneas’s attempts to embrace his father in the
underworld, a failure which parallels Heaney’s troubled memory of walks with his father
along the riverbank just prior to his leaving home at age 12 to attend boarding school in
Derry. The translation of the first half of the Pascoli poem which concludes the volume
transposes Pascoli’s Urbino to the Anahorish Hill of Heaney’s childhood in Derry and
effectively rewrites the perspective and the outcome of his 1984 poem, “A Kite for Michael
and Christopher.” This translation attempts to resolve, or at least clarify, a deeply conflicted
attitude he has had toward his father throughout his poetic career, one which a range of the
poems in Human Chain highlights and one which casts a retrospective light on a number of
earlier Heaney poems. As it happens, too, Heaney published the second half of the Pascoli
poem in the 2012 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Book of Twentieth Century Italian Poetry, and
that poem, with its focus on the dead child and the loving mother, in effect simultaneously
reintroduces the traumatic death of his little brother Christopher in childhood and presents a
self-elegy, much in the same way “The Blackbird of Glanmore” concluded his previous
volume District and Circle.
Dr. Clíona Ní Ríordáin
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3
cniriordain@gmail.com
« Le Heaney français »
France and French literature had a special place in Seamus Heaney’s œuvre. His early poetry is marked
by his version of “The Digging Skeleton after Baudelaire” while his version of Gullevic’s “Herbier de
Bretagne” stands out as one of the memorable translations of his later work. Paris was also the venue
for one of his last public readings in June 2013, where poet and blackbird gave voice to a wonderful
duet; an event commemorated in Gerard Smyth’s poem “Poet and Blackbird” (PIR 111, p.33).
This paper proposes to examine how Heaney became part of the canon in France though his presence
in literary magazines, anthologies and single volume translations. Anthologies of a national literature,
remarked Jean-Yves Masson, in his introduction to the monumental tome Anthologie de la Poésie
irlandaise (Paris, Verdier 1996) provide snapshots of the literature in question but taken from a
different angle, through a different lens, this paper will show how the Heaney selected and translated
through the French lens emerges as distinctly Gallic creation.
Maeve O’Brien
The University of Ulster
obrien-m9@email.ulster.ac.uk
‘I lie waiting’: Unearthing trauma and influence, Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath.
In his critical essay written in 1986 and entitled ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia
Plath’, Seamus Heaney offers a detailed examination of the poetry of Plath that principally
concentrates on how her strict and regimented early verse develops into the unique poetry
that, ‘time and space had been waiting for’. However, despite his acknowledgement of
Plath’s literary prowess and flashes of artistic brilliance, Heaney ultimately concludes that
‘this poet’s youth’ and the entanglement of biography and unadulterated rage that fills
Plath’s later work, ‘overdraws its rights to our sympathy’ and irrevocably limits her
writing. With this conclusion, Heaney appears to consciously disassociate his own writings
and artistic philosophy from Plath’s poetic objectives and achievements.
Taking into consideration Heaney’s personal friendship with Ted Hughes, this paper
will offer a revised interpretation of ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps’ and contend that
Heaney in fact shares an uniquely strong poetic connection and imaginative inner world
with Plath. By devoting particular attention to the similarities found between Heaney’s
North (1975) and Plath’s Ariel (1965), this paper will argue that the most striking
commonality between these two poets is how their writings respond to and navigate
traumatic events and the memories of trauma that permeate both of their lives. Tim Kendall
remarks that Heaney and Plath are united in their use of a ‘higher consciousness’ that
enables them to comprehend and document themes of trauma and conflict in poetry.
Consequently, this paper will explore how Heaney and Plath both poeticise their deeply
complicated relationship with instances of death and legacies of mass slaughter by
juxtaposing blunt, visceral language with a poetic landscape that is filled with distances
and space, bodies that ‘say nothing’ and mute corpses.
Finally, this paper will make the case that Plath’s navigation of trauma informs and
inspires Heaney’s narratives, and by unearthing this Plathian influence that has lain
unnoticed by many critics, we may approach Heaney’s work from a new position.
Dr Danny O’Connor
The University of Liverpool
doc85@liverpool.ac.uk
‘A different kind of animal’: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and
Nature’s Trauma
Much has been made of the relationship between Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney – not least
by Heaney himself. Alongside their long and rewarding friendship, the other obvious junction
in the work of both poets is their focus on nature. In some ways, both the similarities and
differences that allow comparison of their nature poetry can seem superficial: whilst they
share a particular attention to vowel music, Hughes’s wildlife and landscapes are violent and
aggressive in comparison to Heaney’s more playful representations. Yet, there is a deeper
bond in the work of these two poets that these seemingly cosmetic resemblances can reveal.
This paper will propose that the fundamental link between the two poets is a traumatic
relationship with nature. At the root of this is a trauma of representation. For both poets,
mankind is separated from but also identifiable in nature. However, since culture is the
manifestation of mankind’s distance from the rest of the natural world, identifying with
nature through poetry exacerbates this distance as much as it transcends it. Both share an idea
of language as somehow cultivated from nature: Heaney’s ‘vowels plowed in other’ and
Hughes’s Yorkshire dialect that ‘grew out of the ground freakishly’. Yet, where Hughes’s
poetry is primarily enlivened by the tension of writing against nature, Heaney’s poetry tends
to celebrate the way in which nature seems to cross the boundary between mankind and
nature, confirming language. What is traumatic in Hughes’s work is a means of overcoming
trauma in Heaney’s.
Accordingly, this paper will compare how Hughes and Heaney both register and attempt
to overcome this distance between humans and the rest of nature in their poems. Particular
attention will be paid to their attempts to deal with trauma through nature writing in Crow
(1970) and North (1975), as well as their nature poetry more generally.
Laura O’Connor
University of California, Irvine
loconnor@uci.edu
“Seamus Heaney and the “Irish miracle” of literary canonization”
My paper examines Seamus Heaney’s sequence, “Station Island,” as a self-conscious bid to become
part of “the Irish miracle,” Pascale Casanova’s term for Irish modernists’ remarkable eminence in the
world’s literary canon. Yeats and Joyce combine the internationally legible with local arcana in ways
that turn center-periphery hierarchies on their head. By weaving Irish topography into the trellis of
world literature, they immerse international readers in the matter of Ireland and impart insider
knowledge of local terrains. Yeats and Joyce envisage their recursive refashionings of the towering
poet and Dubliner personae as a decolonizing literary praxis, and present their work and the task
confronting the as-yet-unconstituted Irish nation as symbiotic inaugural acts of “forg[ing] in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Heaney’s The Place of Writing proposes the
Archimedean axiom that if one found the “enabling ground” to position the lever one could move
the world. He evidently recognizes the radical ambition inherent in the dense situatedness of Yeats
“rooting of mythology in the earth” via The Tower, and of Stephen and Bloom’s perambulations
around Dublin.
The pilgrim-persona in “Station Island,” like Yeats in “The Tower,” spins his narrative out of, and into,
the penitential site he circuits, summonsing precursor shades to indict his shortcomings in a bid to
“make [his] soul” anew. St Patrick’s Purgatory is prime “enabling ground” for examining the complex
affiliations of a Northern Catholic, as the sectarian partitioning of the surrounding hinterland
suggests. The dense literary and religious intertextuality of the topos itself, and of Heaney’s
rendering of it, plumbs the intertwined religious and literary provenance of the “confession” genre
(and canon hierarchies). Translation plays a redemptive role in the sequence and in the volume’s
peroration, “Sweeney Redivivus.” The increasing centrality of translation to Heaney’s recursive
circuitings is registered by the persona’s obligation to translate a poem/prayer, a task that wittily
glosses the “conversion” peripeteia of the confession genre. The shades encountered by the pilgrimpersona are Catholic males, though formal allusions bring other key precursors into play. A poet’s
visionary imposition on a place is never exempt from the imaginative antithetical ability to subvert it,
Heaney argues in The Place of Writing, and the implications of this conspicuously male lineage for
the politics of canon-formation provoked Catherine Byron’s, and perhaps Peggy O’Brien’s, booklength ripostes. Yet ultimately it is the rich and complex intertextuality of the topos--a site of
competing discourses as well as prior writing—that most intrigues them.
Dr Ciaran O’Neill
Queen’s University Belfast
c.g.oneill@qub.ac.uk
Finding stepping stones? Heaney, poetry and politics.
Seamus Heaney’s early work emerges from a period in Northern Irish history where the task
of poet is challenged by extraordinary civil and political events. This context informs a poetry
that negotiates personal anxieties and communal differences, abounding in questions of
identity and responsibility. The reflective mood of these poems sees the poet ruminate over
notions of belonging, home and place, together with their contested associations. Exhibiting
an anthropological vigour that ostensibly celebrates otherness, Heaney’s poetry is also
burdened by the local ground that is a generous hinterland for his writing. At various
moments his poems traverse cultural borders and reach across traditions, historical and
current, exploring what the poet has called “the possibility of going out on the stepping stone
in order to remove yourself from the hardness and fastness of your home ground”. This
project has created poems gesturing towards reconciliation, or simply a desire for everyday
normalcy in a divided society. However, for the poet, such writing is often conflicted by
personal allegiances and artistic principles.
Selecting poems from Wintering Out (1972) and later volumes, this paper will examine the
conciliatory direction of Heaney’s writing, its consequences and difficulties. The paper will
also consider the legacy of these poems in a local political context.
Stephen O’Neill
Trinity College Dublin
oneillsb@tcd.ie
‘And spirited myself into the street’: the city in District and Circle
Seamus Heaney has often been described by critics as fitting Patrick Kavanagh’s description
of the parochial: someone ‘never in any doubt’ over their townland’s ‘social and artistic
validity’. His poetry, concordantly, is associated with the rural landscape in a measure of
continuity with the Irish Literary Revival. As such, what Michael Allen described as a
resistance to ‘the cosmopolitan self-image’ was fostered carefully by Heaney, and his
representation of Belfast city has also been discussed by critics in relation to how it is either
accessed through intermediaries (Hughes 2003) or registered in sectarian terms (Longley
1994). Heaney explicitly constructed a rural-urban dichotomy in ‘The Early Purges’, where
the ‘talk [that] cuts ice in town’ is poised against the action of kitten culls in ‘well-run farms’,
serving as a microcosm of the relationship between rural and urban spaces that is registered
throughout his poetry.
This relationship, I argue, attains a greater nuance later in the poet’s career. In this paper, I
will discuss the urban spaces beyond what Hughes calls the ‘place of transit’ that Belfast
represents for Heaney, since other cities can be a site of childhood wonder, evoke memories
of his honeymoon, or initiate what he describes in ‘Crediting Poetry’ as ‘journey[s] into the
wideness of the world’. Here I wish to suggest that District and Circle (2006) is a collection
in which his urban experiences, and even concerns, are given poetic expression; that the
ignored, elided or misrepresented city-space of his early collections emerges from this
obscurity into genuine encounters with the metropolis. I will focus on ‘The Tollund Man In
Springtime’, ‘Anything Can Happen’, and the title poem in order to demonstrate how, in this
penultimate volume, Heaney allows the city to ‘sink in deep enough to resurface in an
imaginable way’.
Andrew Osborn
University of Dallas
aosborn@udallas.edu
Visionary Immanence: Seeing Things’ Auditory Groundings
The visionary emphases of Seeing Things have struck many as marking a sharp break from
Heaney’s previous seven collections, which were more down-to-earth, such that vision was
likely as not to be directed down a well or mediated by mud. It’s as if the agrarian groundings
and mnemonic bogs of his elemental poetics had suddenly lifted into the sunlight. But Seeing
Things’ fascination with visual boundary-crossing—with the deep looking-into of face-to-face
encounter, with the imaginative fecundity of spatial and temporal “offing[s],” with the lens-like
focus and telescopic reach availed by thresholds—need not be conceived as epiphanic. For its
insights are of a piece with Heaney’s long-secured wisdom regarding what happens at sound’s
thresholds and hearing’s capacity to substitute for sight. The ear’s tolerance of imprecision, its
hearing despite hardness, informs Heaney’s eventual proliferation and crediting of visionary
marvels.
As one looks with Heaney beyond a window’s frame, “across a well-braced gate,” or with
Dantean intensity into another’s eyes, the marvelous sense is of insight unimpeded by
peripheral or mediating substance. Rhyme conceived broadly, and especially the rough-hewn,
weathered half-rhyme that Heaney marshals, similarly draws attention to the medium’s
materiality—its contours, the imperfections of its pairings—which remarkably does not impede
its capacity to convey its immaterial sense. An enjambed phrase momentarily offers at the line
break’s limit the same sense of freedom, “furtherance,” and the “unforeseen” availed by
darkness’s descent upon a soccer field in “Markings.”
From “Fosterling”: “I can’t remember never having known / The immanent hydraulics of a land
/ Of glar and glit.” That is, not only at age fifty but from as early as his memory of self can probe,
Heaney credited the alchemical marvel of water’s emergings from earth. This formalist account
of Heaney’s evolution argues that Seeing Things’ visionary poetics was no less immanent: its
fire-bright airiness and phenomenal seemings emerge from his former gravities with greater
continuity than critics have generally claimed.
Dr Connal Parr
Queen’s University Belfast
cparr01@qub.ac.uk
Definitively Other: Seamus Heaney and Ulster Protestantism
This paper will mine and assess Seamus Heaney’s complicated, perpetually evolving political
relationship with Ulster Protestantism. Though Heaney’s poetic voice contains fragments of
this at times fraught dialogue, the paper’s main spotlight will fix on Heaney’s rather
underrated critical faculty, from his reviews and essays to the views encased in Dennis
O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones (2008). It will begin with his early analysis of John Hewitt,
whose poetry Heaney once described as ‘full of a stubborn determination to belong to the
Irishry and yet tenaciously aware of a different origin and cast of mind’, later to be revised
into the more combative assessment (always spiced by a degree of personal animus) which
objected to Hewitt’s imagining of Northern Catholics as ‘definitively “other”’. Nevertheless
Heaney will be shown, through the debates raised by the Field Day project and collected in
the Crane Bag, to have very serious antennae for the sensibilities of Ulster Unionists. In a
1977 debate with the more unreconstructed Seamus Deane, Heaney praised Conor Cruise
O’Brien for doing ‘an utterly necessary job in rebuking all easy thoughts about the Protestant
community in the North’. By the end – and via Heaney’s public encounters with the likes of
Danny Morrison (on a train) – we find Heaney’s gaze resting coolly on the Flag Protests
which blew up at the end of 2012. ‘There’s never going to be a united Ireland’, remarked the
poet in January 2013, ‘So why don’t you let them fly the flag?’ The comments provoked a
minor storm of nationalist discontent with some angered by Heaney’s apparent detachment –
a nuanced, considered salvo with which to close the poet’s turbulent engagement with
Northern Protestantism.
Dr Anna Pilz
University of Liverpool
A.Pilz@liverpool.ac.uk
Bird/man/poet: Sweeney in the Woods
‘Surely’, asks W.B. Yeats in his 1897 essay on the ‘Celtic Element in Literature’, ‘if one goes
far enough into the woods, one will find all that one is seeking?’ Trees and woods offer a
dense web of associations generally, and in the Irish context specifically. The importance of
trees in Irish cultural heritage and folklore has been widely acknowledged. And so, it comes
as something of a surprise that comparatively little attention has been paid to one of the most
celebrated Irish medieval literary characters, Mad King Sweeney, and his exile to the woods.
Considering the etymology of the word ‘madness’ from the much earlier usage of
‘woodness’, closer attention to his environment seems apt; metamorphosed into a bird-like
creature, he lives astray in the tree-tops, seeking ... what?
In his introduction to Sweeney Astray (1983), Heaney describes Sweeney as an ‘artist,
displaced, guilty’. Mentally and physically astray, he is exiled to live in the branches of the
trees as a ‘bird-brain’, moving to and fro, out of and back into the arboreal landscape. Having
praised the ‘the tang and clarity of a pristine world full of woods and water and birdsong’ of
early Irish nature poetry, Heaney’s own adventure into that world in his translation of Buile
Suibhne is permeated by hazels and oaks, ivy and hawthorn; wells and water; birds and
birdsong.
In this paper, we trace the trajectory of Sweeney’s journey as ‘bird/man/poet’ with a
particular focus on the multiple nature of his habitat as a place of exile, recluse, and
sanctuary. We are interested in his response to, and interaction with, the arboreal landscapes
of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man, as articulations of loss and gain;
dispossession and repossession; exile and home; the uncanny and the sublime. We consider
the particular importance of his ‘at-placedness’ in the woods on his journey from medieval
Irish courtly and political culture, via madness and ‘flight’, and into poetry.
Fanny QUÉMENT
Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
fanny.quement@gmail.com
The Poet on Record: Seamus Heaney’s Northern Voice
If “poetry is memorable voice” (Preoccupations, 199), Heaney’s multifaceted voice – as a writer,
lecturer, broadcaster, public or studio performer – was regularly recorded in a specific and
memorable form: that of the audiobook. This paper will tackle the question of Heaney’s Northern
identity in relation to this format, focusing on three recordings: the early session issued on The Poet
Speaks (Argo, 1967), the cassette Stepping Stones (Faber-Penguin Audiobooks, 1996), and the
Beowulf CD (Faber-Penguin Audiobooks, 2000). On the Argo record, Heaney can be heard alongside
other Northern voices, Irish or Scottish, such as Hugh MacDiarmid’s, to which his reading should be
compared. As for Stepping Stones, significantly released in 1996, it constitutes one of Heaney’s
attempts to address the Troubles, especially with its interplay between poems and glosses. Finally,
the prosody of the audio Beowulf shines a nuanced light on Heaney’s claim to a “voice-right”
(preface, xxiii) and his daringly Northern Irish appropriation of the British canon. As this selection
highlights variety, my paper will examine how Heaney voiced on record a flexible Northernness.
Fixation is more often associated with recording than flexibility. However, far from muting the
multiplicity of potential readings offered by print, Heaney’s audiobooks resound with many voices in
one. Influenced by Northern accents and dialects, Heaney’s hybrid voice also plays around with
more polished tones. Glosses are inflected differently from poems, and the recorded voice may
contrast with previous recordings or, above all, with what readers remember from the inner voice
they heard encrypted in print. I will demonstrate how such polyphony requires a permanent tuning
of the ear, and calls for a new approach through close listening and reception theory. This is not to
say that authorial readings should be considered as authoritative, but Heaney’s audiobooks offer an
insight into both his public stance as a poet and his aesthetics.
Stephen Regan
Durham University
stephen.regan@durham.ac.uk
‘Growing up to Eliot: Seamus Heaney and T.S. Eliot’
In the essay ‘Learning from Eliot’, Seamus Heaney confesses to having been ‘daunted by the
otherness of T.S. Eliot and all that he stood for’, and he admits that it was some time before ‘he
began to grow up to Eliot’. The aspiring poet was stirred by the sensuous passages in ‘Ash
Wednesday’, but only later perceived ‘the finer tone and stricter disciplines of Eliot’s poetry’. This
paper will look at the ways in which Heaney learns from Eliot, including the ways in which he is
alerted to his own complex relationships with tradition and goes on to develop an acute
appreciation of what Eliot memorably termed ‘the auditory imagination’. It will propose that
Heaney’s ‘growing up to Eliot’ coincides with his growing recognition as a writer of international
reach and significance. It is through Eliot, for instance, that Heaney comes to a mature
understanding of Dante’s visionary art. In the process, his own work appears to have accommodated
and emulated the mystical qualities of Four Quartets. In Electric Light and later volumes, it is clear
that Heaney confidently counts among the voices of his education the strange and unmistakable
voices of The Waste Land. Eliot’s creative and critical achievements undoubtedly play a major role in
Heaney’s emergence as a poet of international stature and appeal.
Matthew Ryan Shelton
University of Connecticut
matthew.shelton@uconn.edu
Poetic Translation as Peace Process:
A Methadological Reappraisal of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf
The importance of translation in Seamus Heaney's oeuvre has been well established for
some time. Its poetic, not to mention political, implications have been attested to by the poet
himself – most notably in his essay collection The Government of the Tongue, in which he introduced
the importance of context to his conception of the task of the translator. His verse translation of
Beowulf has both been lauded as well as denounced with equal fervor, leading some critics to read
his self-consciously political theorization of poetic translation as a methodology of “countercolonization” in the context of Northern Ireland – the linguistic invasion and co-option of what might
be considered the foundational text of English Literature by an Hiberno-English poetic sensibility.
But when taken in the context of Heaney's translations of the 1990s – during which period
the Northern Ireland Peace Process took shape, not to mention the poet's Nobel win mid-decade –
Beowulf takes on a very different character. It becomes the culmination of a body of translation
work notable in its conscious employment of cribs, collaboration, and often startling structural
juxtaposition. As such, the text displays a methodologically deliberate deconstruction of definitive
borders (political, poetic, or otherwise), exhibiting a marked resemblance to the Deleuzo-Guattarian
concept of Territorial Refrain, in which the interconnectedness of intellectual, cultural, etc.
conglomerates known as “assemblages” is effected via a perpetual process of territorialization,
deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Indeed, as Frank Kermode has observed, the very
“foundational” identity of Beowulf (a story characterized by the collision of languages and cultures,
itself the product of Anglo-Saxon co-option of Scandinavian folklore) is inherently suspect, a fact
upon which Heaney's methodology deliberately capitalizes.
The present paper proposes a reappraisal and theorization of Heaney's practice of poetic
translation as exemplified in Beowulf, considered in light of (and indeed as) Peace Process. Poetic
Translation for Heaney becomes a means of dissolving political and ideological borderlines, allowing
for “cross-” or “mutual-”, as opposed to “counter-colonization,” drawing directly from Ulster's own
culturally and linguistically plural legacy. Heaney's co-option of such source text conventions as
apposition, for example, allows for a poetic dramatization of this dynamic; and his methodological
interweaving of contexts – of target text as well as source text – allows him to address real world
conflict via the very act of translation, the methodology itself embodying the principles by which a
lasting reconciliation may be achieved. Heaney's theory of translation, based on the interconnecting
“flows” between languages (i.e. linguistic “assemblages”), thus makes it possible for neither the
source text nor the target text to relinquish their respective “identities,” but rather to incorporate
each other in a dynamic process of imaginative creation.
Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado
University of Edinburgh
D.M.Sherratt-Bado@sms.ed.ac.uk
‘Make these islands fresh’: The ‘Language of Exile’ in Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney
Astray and Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’
This paper features a comparative analysis of Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (1983) and
Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’ (1979), long narrative poems which examine the
flight of the poet-exile from his homeland. They are also modern-day interpretations of
ancient epics: Heaney’s Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish, is based on a seventeenthcentury manuscript of the medieval legend of Buile Suibhne, while Walcott’s ‘The Schooner
Flight’ is a Caribbean-centric reworking of Homer’s Odyssey.
In his 1995 Nobel lecture ‘Crediting Poetry,’ Heaney declares, ‘Poetic form is both the ship
and the anchor. It at once a buoyancy and a holding, allowing for the simultaneous
gratification of whatever is centrifugal and centripetal in mind and body’ (29). Accordingly,
Heaney and fellow Nobel laureate Walcott, friends and mutual admirers of each other’s work,
navigate local topologies of language within their writings while also mapping the
transnational ripple effects of poetry written in indigenized Englishes in the wake of British
imperialism.
Heaney titles his 1980 review of Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979) ‘The Language
of Exile,’ and closes with Shabine’s incisive remark regarding colonialism, ‘But that’s all
them bastards have left us: words.’ When the postcolonial poet-exile is left to ‘assuag[e]
himself by his utterance,’ as Heaney pronounces of Sweeney, is the journey into the wilds of
creative frenzy ‘to disengage oneself from the world’ in a kind of artistic crossing onto ‘the
hither side’ of reality, ‘where common language abdicates’ and ‘a poem speaks,’ as
Emmanuel Lévinas contends (1987: 2)? Heaney and Walcott indicate that if poetry exists
outwith the bounds of common discourse, then it demands a feral language discharged from
an equally untamed imagination – one that is born out of the silence of exile imposed upon
the poet by the sentencing of History.
Barry Sloan
University of Southampton
wbs@soton.ac.uk
Last Things in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
The title of this proposed paper, and its starting point, derive from the published version
of one of Heaney’s Oxford lectures on poetry – ‘Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry
of W.B.Yeats and Philip Larkin’. I will begin by taking account of the ways in which
Heaney interrogates the view advanced by Larkin in ‘Aubade’ that ‘Death is no different
whined at than withstood’, and will then consider the implications of his assertions that
‘the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place’, and that ‘[t]he poet who would be
most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it
observes them.’ This will provide the context for an examination of the way in which
Heaney himself addressed ‘last things’ in some of his own poetry, and of the extent to
which he achieves the kind of ‘redress’ that he sought to define and affirm as the
supreme achievement of poetry in his Oxford lectures. I propose to focus mainly on
poems from Heaney’s later works where he confronts his own ageing, losses and
mortality and to explore the imaginative and formal resources with which he endeavoured
both to address and to transcend these circumstances. I also hope to argue that by his own
practice, Heaney established himself as an exemplary figure whose poetry is, in
the words of Czeslaw Milosz which he quotes in his lecture, ‘on the side of life’.
Charlene Small,
Queen’s University Belfast
csmall07@qub.ac.uk
“Where all is woven into// And of itself…”: Reading Human Chain as a final collection.
From ‘Digging’, the first poem of Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney exhibits himself as a poet
concerned with continuity. This concern is evident across his oeuvre and culminates in what Neil
Corcoran refers to as “the harmonic resolution of …various motifs and motives” (English Poetry,
184). Released in 2010, Human Chain is the last collection Seamus Heaney published in his lifetime.
As a collection it displays the ‘craft’ and ‘technique’ expected of the poet and among its recurrent
themes is the modification of memory via new experiences. Human Chain revisits many of the
settings and figures known elsewhere across Seamus Heaney’s forty-seven year career. Considering
its motifs of work, language, place and intertextuality, noting their relevance and appearance in other
points of the oeuvre, I will show how Heaney has used his poetry to inform a persona that has secured
his posterity. In Human Chain the importance of this persona, and readers’ expectations of it, is
poignantly apparent. In the wake of Heaney’s parting the admiration of his incredible legacy has been
evident in most, if not all, of the formal and informal tributes paid; keeping in mind this idea of a
public and poetic legacy, I will offer a reading of Human Chain that explores how it serves as the apt
final collection in a prestigious and hard-earned career.
Jason D. Stevens
Cornerstone University
Jason.stevens@cornerstone.edu
Recentering North: Describing History Without Place
This paper reassesses North in light of its poetics and argues that it inaugurates Heaney’s
mode of redress. It discovers a mode of lyric deliberation as a response to history. Not until
Government of the Tongue and not fully until The Redress of Poetry will Heaney’s prose
catch up with the poetics he discovers in North. This paper offers a close reading of the twopart “North” with attention to the final twelve lines delivered by the “longship’s swimming
tongue.” The first part of the “epiphany” of the “ocean-deafened voices” is a grim catalogue
of greed and violence associated with the history of the North. The second part’s injunction to
“‘Lie down / in the word-hoard. . . . Compose in darkness. . . . [T]rust the feel of what nubbed
treasure / your hands have known’” has profound heuristic ramifications. Most critics have
focused on the first half of this passage, yet few, if any, have explored the poetics implied by
the second part. Close attention to the mode of invention discovered in darkness is crucial to
understanding North as a particularly lyric response to history, not merely a commentary on
it.
The paper also examines the largely ignored or unacknowledged influence of Wallace
Stevens, particularly his poem “Description Without Place,” on North’s poetics. (Bernard
O’Donoghue, for example, misattributes to Hopkins a Stevensian quotation in North’s
“Fosterling.”) Stevens provides the key to understanding that in North history is not present
in the poems; history is present as the poems. Reexamining “North’s” heuristic epiphany in
light of Stevens’ meditations on invention sheds new light on Heaney’s approach to history.
As North approaches its fortieth anniversary, the need is greater than ever for critical redress
that seeks to credit the lyric discoveries of this pivotal volume in Heaney’s oeuvre.
Kelly Sullivan
Boston College
kelly.sullivan.4@bc.edu
“Kenning North”
Heaney’s interest in Anglo-Saxon sounds and structures deeply informs his 1975 North, a
volume in which he employs the consonance of Anglo-Saxon idiom in a conscious effort to
link Irish history to a Northern European mythology. Heaney found in Anglo-Saxon the
kenning, a pairing which opened language up to a depth of meaning freed of limitation, one
in which the binaries of a sectarian society and a divisive war could be re-coupled without
simplification.
Yet Anglo-Saxon poetry influenced not only the sound of North -- the “contrivances of its
language” (as he writes of Beowulf) -- but also the very “structuring of the tale” which is
elaborately organized and controlled. Just as Heaney uses kennings throughout the book in
order to find new ways to describe familiar things, so too does he take the kenning as a
structuring force, one which enables him to rename and defamiliarize the North itself.
This paper looks at Heaney’s kennings and the structure of North in order to explore the
poet’s interest in politics and public speech. His use of structural kenning is less obvious than
kenned words, most notably because it speaks to a grammar of a book as a whole, of a
language of shaping force working beyond the line, stanza, or poem. But such structural
kennings mirror the metaphoric and metonymic power of the concepts they make known,
endlessly doubling and reflecting back both the meaning and the interpretation. In the
medieval Icelandic from which the term kenning derives, kenna means “made known (by).”
This paper argues Heaney’s use of structural kennings expands and re-couples our sense of
a place and conflict, and thereby “makes known”, through a combination of public and
private speech, a complicated but politicized North.
Professor Meg Tyler
CGS, Boston University
mtyler@bu.edu
“Making the Air Gasp”: Heaney and his collaboration with Mohammed Fairouz
In 2012, Heaney collaborated with a young Arab-American composer, Mohammed Fairouz, to
create a musical composition called “Anything Can Happen,” based on three poems from Heaney’s
2006 volume, District & Circle (“In Iowa,” “Höfn,” and “Anything Can Happen”), a volume that was
penned in what Heaney called “a new age of anxiety.” Heaney rationalized the choice of poems to
Fairouz by saying, “I thought a triptych could be made as follows – the first two being ominous, the
third catastrophic – the omen fulfilled, as it were.” In 2013 I heard the piece performed at Marsh
Chapel at Boston University. In my talk I will discuss this most recent collaborative act and reflect on
how the collaboration itself and the piece of music that arose from it tie into the larger concerns of
District & Circle.
In the composition, Heaney’s text (in English) alternates with passages (“Sura”) sung in the Arabic
injeel. This bringing together of what might at first appear as an uncomfortable pairing seems fitting
as the three poems attend to global unpredictability and consequence. The first, “In Iowa,” finds us
in a tempest-tossed landscape, the warmth of humanity displaced by feet of snow. The language is
resonant with biblical overtones. The second poem,” Höfn,” the name of a small Icelandic fishing
village seen from above by the poet passing over in an airplane, offers us a glimpse of a melting
glacier, the consequence of the abusing the planet. And the third in the triptych, “Anything Can
Happen,” a translation of a Horatian ode, describes a cataclysm that can come out of nowhere – a
clear blue sky, the finest of September days – and rain terror down upon us. In each poem, Heaney
fuses together on the line conflicting elements: parting or rising waters, the sun’s warmth and a
glacier’s demise, a pristine blue sky that delivers death. It has been his tendency to bring together
disparate elements on the page, to create at least a momentary harmony, as he does with words
from the Anglo-Saxon and Latin, or, in this case, English and Arabic. These unexpected congregations
defuse the conflict, or launch music into the air.
Prof. John P Waters
Glucksman Ireland House, New York University
jpw7@nyu.edu
In Theory: Critical Practice and managed freedom in Seamus Heaney’s writing
Apart from quips about Derry and Derrida and a long-standing defense of lyric sensibility and
imaginative freedom from one or another entanglement with politics or ideology, the coincidence of
Seamus Heaney’s career in letters with the rise and decline of literary theory has not been
adequately addressed. Given that the heat and much of the light has gone out of the debates that
not so long ago were polarizing and seemingly intractable, it is worth considering what lessons
Heaney’s carefully managed relation with Theory might hold for poetry, criticism, and literary
intellectual practice more generally. These issues were the subject of interview questions with
Heaney (as well as personal conversations over a 25 year span) over the course of his life; my
contention is that there is still unfinished business to be thought through in the aesthetics/politics,
poetry/theory dyad. Indeed, over the final two years of his life, I had occasion to discuss these
issues with him, in the context of an invitation, accepted just before he died, to accept a Global
Distinguished Professorship at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. In this paper I shall
argue that Heaney’s careful management of the antinomies of poetry and theory over his career can
illuminate something distinctive in an elusive but still tangible vision of the intellectual and
pedagogical practice of Irish Studies scholarship.
David-Antoine Williams
St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, Ontario
david.williams@uwaterloo.ca
Aura and Authority: Words and Dictionaries in the Poems and Prose
In correspondence, Seamus Heaney describes a ‘red-backed old Chambers in the Mossbawn
house’ of his childhood: ‘The physical book and the authority that was lodged in and around it are
what stay with me most.’ This paper will explore Heaney’s uses of dictionaries, primarily the
Oxford English Dictionary, in his poems and critical prose. In the prose I’ll focus on Heaney’s
rhetorical tendency to organize an argument according to a dictionary’s denotational
taxonomy—in ‘The Redress of Poetry’ most doggedly, but in other essays and occasional pieces
too. Considering this as representative of one side of a productive tension between meaning and
sound in language [formulated variously by Heaney and his critics at least since Wintering Out]—
between a semantic ‘discovery, a saving grace, something that clinches or copes’ and what is
elsewhere described as the ‘phonetic allure’ of words, ‘their aura of a meaning which has been
intuited but not yet quite formulated’—I will go on to consider a selection of (mainly later)
poems in which the influence of the dictionary can be felt, drawing on published and archival
materials. The dictionary represents an authority that is both obeyed and resisted by Heaney, as
he finds in the ‘phonetic allure’ a wanted counterweight to the clinching power of the dictionary
definition. However, in thinking through Heaney’s appeals and responses to lexicographical
authorities, I also want to highlight the contingency of lexicographical enterprise, which flows
from linguistic contingency (or arbitrariness) more generally. Heaney often thinks of his writings
as “coping” with just this aspect of language: e.g., in the fact that ‘hope’ and ‘history’ do not
rhyme, but also that they might well have, had the facts of language been different. I want to
argue that both aura and authority are simultaneously undermined and shored up by this
contingency.
Zhu Yu
English department, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
adazhuyu@gmail.com
‘A First Line That Goes Musically’:
Seamus Heaney’s Idea of Musicality in Poetry Composition
Seamus Heaney talked about poetry writing in an interview, ‘You can’t get started without a first line
that goes musically – by which I don’t mean melodiously, just that it needs phonetic purchase or
rhythmical promise.’ 1 For Heaney, musicality is closely related to the birth of a poem. It is musicality
that distinguishes poetry from other literary genres. However, it is difficult for both critics and
translators to comment on musicality; not only because musical effects in one language cannot be
preserved perfectly in another, but it is also because musicality, as an aesthetic element, is
subjective. Even so, I still would like to discuss the importance of musicality in Heaney’s poetry
composition through an analysis of his poems. The essay consists of three parts: 1) The importance
of ‘a first line that goes musically’ in starting a poem. Here, ‘a first line’ does not refer mechanically
to the very first line of a poem, but it refers to that original, musical energy that initiates a poem. It is
what Heaney calls the ‘initial rhythmic suggestiveness’ or ‘muscle tone’, which gives a poem form
rather than shape. 2) The power of Heaney’s poetry is ‘phonetic rather than political’. Speaking of
the composition of ‘Digging’, Heaney said that he was responding to ‘an entirely phonetic prompt’
instead of to any social, political formation. Music is both means and matter in his poetry, especially
in Wintering Out. 3) Music and ‘self-forgetfulness’. Heaney thinks that lyric writing requires selfforgetfulness. Musical elements help a poet enter into this unconscious state and write intuitively
with a kind of ‘wise passiveness’ (Wordsworth), so that a deeper self will naturally emerge from the
inner music of a poem. To conclude, ‘we still believe what we hear.’(Heaney, ‘The Singer’s House’).