Seamus Justin Heaney (b. April 13, 1939) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer from County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he is one of the most widely known and important poets working in English, or perhaps any language, today.
See the Wikipedia profile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney o o o o o o o o o o o o The Guardian Profile: Seamus Heaney Son of the soil Though he denies being British, he's the UK's leading poet and has now reworked an English masterpiece. But, says Nicholas Wroe, the Irish farm boy who went on to win the Nobel prize is dogged by critics who complain he's too detached from the Troubles The Guardian Saturday October 9, 1999 http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,,257702,00.html When Shelley described poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world", it is not too fanciful to imagine he had someone like Seamus Heaney in mind. Heaney's 1995 Nobel prize citation praised not only the "lyrical beauty" of his work, but also its "ethical depth". His subtle probings of three decades of "life waste and spirit waste" in Northern Ireland have provided rare shafts of illumination into the gloomy complexities of the province and his intelligence and humanity have seen him venerated all over the world. Poet Laureate Andrew Motion says of Heaney's translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, published this week, that he has "made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece. It's very interesting how his own defined Irishness approaches something that is generally considered to be a foundation of specifically English poetry. But the poem has not been appropriated by him. There is an inclusiveness about his translation which is something much more big-hearted, just as one would expect from him". "He has a very prolific talent", says James Fenton, who followed Heaney as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. "I saw him and Ted Hughes give a reading at the end of his time at Oxford that was undoubtedly the best poetry reading I have ever been to. Seamus has a marvellous delivery and is a tremendously attractive personality." It seems that while Shelley's line may be strictly applicable to Heaney - he is indeed unacknowledged "as a legislator" - there is no getting away from the fact that the one thing Heaney has never lacked is acknowledgement. His life can be seen as a pageant of recognition from the age of 11, when he won a scholarship and was transported from the family farm in County Derry, to a prestigious Catholic boarding school, right up until the Nobel. In between he was head prefect, claimed a first at university for which he was awarded the medal for academic achievement, and published a rapturously received debut collection of poems that set the critical tone for his subsequent output. He was elected to the Oxford post in 1989 and is currently Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard. When the Nobel came, nearly everyone was delighted, but few were actually surprised. Heaney has lived most of his adult life and all of his career under conditions of the most rigorous critical scrutiny and expectation. It was Clive James who first noted in the early 70s, with a commendable prescience, that "some people are going to start comparing him with Yeats". Since then, both the comparison and his status as the leading poet of his generation have been taken as read as much by his critics as by his supporters. James's prophecy was actually fulfilled a few years later by the American poet Robert Lowell, who baldly declared in a review of Heaney's 1975 collection, North, that he was indeed, "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats". The critic, poet, and fellow Northern Irishman, Tom Paulin, recalls the impact the Nobel prize had on Heaney. "He did a lot of travelling and lecturing, as I think he must have felt he owed it to people, instead of going into hibernation. And that's entirely typical of his extraordinary civic dedication. But what was really impressive was that he managed to survive it and he kept on writing." The publication of his Beowulf translation is the first fruit of this post-Nobel work. Heaney had picked at the project for 15 years before finally committing himself to it in 1996. His translation will inevitably become the definitive school and college text for a generation. Discussion of Beowulf has previously been almost exclusively conducted inside academia, with the long-running row over its place on the English syllabus occasionally breaking out in rashes of erudite rancour. But Heaney's translation has pushed it into the mainstream. Fenton predicts, "It will be everyone's Christmas book of the year, certainly everyone's Christmas poetry book." But perhaps more fundamentally, Heaney's translation has raised a slew of questions about the nature of the work itself; issues of cultural identity and ownership, nationalism and language have all been stirred up. The Irish farm boy has re-fashioned the rock-solid cornerstone of English literature and in so doing has amended the literary architecture not only of the present, but also of the past. "As the years have gone on I have became increasingly devoted to the figure of Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon poet," says Heaney, sitting in the kitchen of his comfortable but unprepossessing Dublin home 50 yards from the sea. "The myth of the beginning of English sacred poetry is that this guy Caedmon was a worker on a farm attached to the abbey at Whitby. But every time the harp was passed at the feast Caedmon would contrive to find a way not to be there because he thought he was not very good at chanting or singing with the harp. So he went out to the cattle in the yard, and one night when he was outside working, an angel appeared and said, 'Caedmon, sing me the creation.' And he obeyed and began to sing the first English poem about creation." The agricultural comparison is both attractive and apt. Heaney has said that he's read so many times that he was born on a farm called Mossbawn, the first of nine children, that he's stopped believing it himself, but this is where the road to Stockholm began. It was a happy childhood. Many of the day-to-day activities of the farm were subsequently co-opted into the poetry, as were family members and the muddy Ulster landscape itself. Heaney went to the local school, which was attended by Protestants and Catholics, and while there the 1947 Northern Ireland education act was passed, giving vastly increased access to higher education for children of poorer families. He won a scholarship to board at St Columb's College, a clerical-run school in Derry city. The school was a remarkable powerhouse of emerging Catholic ambition and has produced a generation of leading figures in all spheres of Irish public life. His contemporaries included fellow Nobel prizewinner John Hume, writer Seamus Deane, playwright Brian Friel and journalist Eamonn McCann. "I was extremely unhappy for the first couple of years because I was homesick," says Heaney, "but by the end I fitted it like a glove. I was head prefect and I enjoyed it. One of my Elysian memories is going out after night prayers on to the college lawn in the summer and practising for sports; the smell of new grass and so on. I don't think we were conscious of an ambition for the future, but there probably was a sense that we were being pitched out of the nest. I was the first in my family taking that path and I know Seamus Deane was the first in his family. We were all sort of forging the path." Eamonn McCann was also the first from his family to receive such an education, but he was a day boy who lived in the Bogside. "We regarded the boarders with some pity because this was the fifties and we were hanging round ice cream parlours with girls, smoking and listening to rock'n'roll while they were locked up with priests and not allowed newspapers or even comic books. But," says McCann, "Seamus performed his role as head prefect with gusto. He was quite the disciplinarian, but that's OK because it's not everyone who can say they've been boxed round the ear by a Nobel prize winner. And it's not everyone who can say they've been kissed by a Nobel laureate either. I played the female lead to him in a play and we kissed to the whoops and cheers of a packed school hall. My big line to him was, 'Darling, I could tell you anywhere by the way you kiss.' We couldn't do rehearsals for laughing too much, but we did it on stage." Heaney left for Queen's University, Belfast, where he read English Literature. He wrote "a little bit of poetry" and was a star student. When he gained a first he was offered the opportunity to go to Oxford. "But it all happened so quickly," he says. "There was no family precedent and the only expectation was that I would proceed to a job. But I suppose that brush with the invitation to Oxford just jacked up my sense of what was possible. A veil had been lifted slightly, trembled a little." Heaney then took a job teaching in an intermediate school and enrolled for a postgraduate course back at Queen's. He also began to write poetry in earnest. "I started discovering a voice and discovering animations. It was a life-turning point. I think I really came alive to myself through poetry and young energy." The deeply moving poem Mid-Term Break, about the time he was called home from St Columb's after his four-year-old brother Christopher had been killed by a car, was written at this time, and poems were published in the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times. "It was a magical transition to move from the speechless and needy and hopeful, although you are not quite sure what you are hopeful for. In yourself you feel, 'Yeah, something happened there,' and that is ratified by the world and the mystery of editors and you move into a textural life as it were. And then the next confirmation is the actual publication of your book where you read about yourself in the third person and your name is detached from you. I don't think anything ever equals the sense of change and gift that comes from young poetry." In one sense, he says, "The Nobel is just another prize; it changes something but it doesn't change your being the way your first writing does. You usually have something of veteran status by the time it arrives and you should be able to handle it. But you can't handle that first sense that you have written something, except with joy and surprise and narcissism and yodelling." By this time Heaney was part of a set of young Belfast poets called the Group, assembled by Philip Hobsbaum, a lecturer at Queen's who had been taught by Leavis and was an admirer of Ted Hughes. Hobsbaum organised sessions of reading and discussion attended by Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and James Simmons, among others. "Admittedly I was the first of the gang to get published," recalls Heaney, "and there was a sense of the flutter around that, but I think Derek Mahon and Michael Longley would have been more securely established in their own minds as having a poetic call, so there wasn't any sense among us of a head. There was a sense of energy and difference and, I suppose, competitiveness. But I guess between 1962, when I left the postgraduate school and started to teach, and 1965, when my book was accepted, a hell of a lot happened." Three of his poems had been bought by Karl Miller for the New Statesman; he published a slim volume called Eleven Poems; and in 1965 he married teacher Marie Devlin. Digging, one of the poems chosen by Miller, opened Heaney's debut collection, Death of a Naturalist, published by Faber & Faber in 1966. It is still one of his most famous poems and, knowing what we know today of how his career progressed, it is a remarkably bold statement that has been utterly justified by time and achievement. In it he describes how naturally and expertly his father and his grandfather handled a spade, whether digging potatoes or peat, before bemoaning that "I've no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and thumb / The squat pen rests. / I'll dig with that." Death of a Naturalist attracted astonishing reviews for a first collection. Christopher Ricks called it "outstanding" in the New Statesman and Alan Ross said it was "a book of enormous promise" in the London Magazine. Tom Paulin remembers reading the book at school. "It was a big public event. This was his plenary work, it set everything going. The pastoral and nature poems carry all sorts of things that were opened out in later collections. He extended into public territory, into politics later, whereas it was all encoded in his first volumes." Heaney acknowledges the scale of his early success. "Yeah, the stakes were raised. From the beginning I felt myself under scrutiny in a special way because in those days Faber's was an elevation, it wasn't just a publisher. My book was accepted in 1965 and Eliot had only died in 1963. As far as I was concerned, Faber was the home of Wallace Stevens, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, WH Auden. They weren't human creatures, so being published by Faber's, I felt I was under scrutiny. It wasn't until I did North in 1975 that I really thought, 'OK, that's fine, you've paid your way, now proceed.'" The years between 1965 and 1975 saw life in Northern Ireland transformed by the Troubles. Heaney has been criticised, by both sides, for being too detached from events on the ground, but in the late 60s, already a public figure, he was "necessarily" involved in some of the marches. "And then the interviewing began in earnest," he says. "All the journalists who arrived in Belfast would go to the young scribblers, so that sense of being called upon to represent was there. I think anybody that didn't feel that would have been pretty insensitive. But then the question is, what do you do with this access?" James Fenton says it has been difficult for Heaney to manage this access and expectation to comment. "He's been criticised a lot along the lines of 'If you're not with us you're against us' but he has managed to rise above that to be true to a kind of nationalism which isn't corrupted by the Provos." Heaney concedes that "things changed radically once the Provos started. That changed the safe moral high ground that the majority of Catholics occupied up to internment in 1971. And gradually, once the bombing started from the republican side, it wrong-footed righteousness; victim culture couldn't promote itself so readily." Andrew Motion notes, "On the whole, over here he gets a very warm welcome, but we don't quite see the range of responses he has to deal with in Ireland." Eamonn McCann explains, "The Catholic middle class take great pride in him and, let's face it, if anyone won the war in Ireland over the last 30 years it is the Catholic middle class. There is no other section of the population whose position has so improved, and Seamus is their poet. His work is perceived to be rooted in the clammy soil of northern Catholicism and these people used to be stained because they came from the bogs, and now he has fashioned from the bog a new image and new reputation which has fanned out around the world." It's slightly different for the republican community, which tends to be more urban, says McCann. "But in Gerry Adams' awful, sentimental memoirs there was a scene when he was on the run, of course, sitting on this bus when the troops came looking around. He kept his head down in this book he was reading and the local proletariat silently protected him by not giving a flicker of recognition or interest in him. It's too perfect, but what other poet would he be reading but Seamus Heaney? So he is a bit of a talisman, but real republicans, as opposed to posing republican leaders, would regard him as being very stand-offish and not engaged." This apparent lack of engagement is equally criticised by those who feel he should be far more censorious of violence. The Belfast Catholic writer Robert McLiam Wilson poked fun at a Heaney-esque figure in his novel Eureka Street, and launched a blistering attack on him following the award of the Nobel prize. "Those who would maintain that in writing about hedges and blackberries, Heaney has actually treated the manifestations of political violence in a different manner are entirely fraudulent. Anyone who has actually read Seamus Heaney's work can only conclude that, in the main, he has left out that unpoetic stuff, that very actual mess. Some of Heaney's adherents might claim that this is because he rises about the fray. To which one might profitably enquire why a writer would want to attempt such an ascension." In the early 70s, Heaney made the decision to leave Ulster for good. "Ian Paisley was very vigorous in the late 60s, people forget that. There was a lot of sectarian energy there." Heaney received death threats but they were only part of the reason he left. "There was no sense of being specially selected. There were phone calls to everyone's house and you would have felt deprived if you hadn't got one. But, of course, there was tension and anxiety, But that was Belfast. Belfast is a very tense place at the best of times." The Heaneys moved to a cottage in Wicklow in 1972. "In one way it was leaving and hiding in the country, but in another way you were exposing yourself to yourself. And, also as a couple, exposing ourselves to ourselves. I think we started again and I started again with a definite sense of dedication in a different way." He's never seriously considered moving back north. "I am still at home in the north, it's just that a change occurred. I was more grown up in myself and I moved into a life that wasn't a given life, it was one that I invented and discovered. I always think of my 1979 book, Field Work, as a bonus of the change. It was an expression of an adult experience. Something was verified by the move and my home is here now." He has, he says, always had a sense of being an outsider. "From the moment I started college, I was a slight stranger at home. I was the eldest, I was away from home. And living in Belfast I felt on the edge, not alienated, just separated. Here there is a sense of being completely at eye-level with life." In the years after he moved south he truly became a superstar poet and so his decision to object to his inclusion in Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison's 1982 Penguin book of contemporary British poetry was particularly controversial. Heaney wrote a pamphlet which included the lines, " Be advised, my passport's green/ No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast the Queen. " "I completely respect what he did," says Motion now, "but it does need a little effort to put it back in to context. Our anthology came out at a time when people were crucially getting involved with these issues more or less for the first time in recent history and in a sense I'm pleased for him that our anthology was a convenient peg for him to hang this argument on." James Fenton says that a lot of people will always think that Heaney is British. "He was born in Northern Ireland and they think he belongs to us. In fact, whether he likes it or not, he is our leading poet. He has been taken to people's hearts and if what defines the community is the language, he is in the tradition of English poetry." In the early 80s Heaney took up a teaching post in Harvard for one term a year and it was his time in America that led to the Beowulf project. "I was very deliberately listening to a more open-weave kind of writing, much more conversational. I read a lot of John Ashbery. It's the opposite of the European pattern for poetry which is back to the echoing of the first deposits. He was more Dante and Disney together; very American. Anyway, I was asked to do Beowulf and I prescribed it to myself as a counter course to keep some connection with the ground base of my language and of the noises in myself." After seven or eight years of indecision, he says, the publisher decided to finally call it off. "And it was very interesting, I didn't want to yield it up so I just headed into it. Then in the October the Stockholm business struck and that discombobulated me for a while. So I was very glad to have it as a kind of steady day job." Heaney is genuinely self-effacing about his award and hedges round the subject with phrases like "the Stockholm Business" and even the "N word" rather than saying "Nobel prize". He was on holiday in Greece when it was announced. When he arrived back in Dublin he was met as a national hero at the airport by the prime minister. Heaney now wears the mantle of Ireland's leading private citizen lightly. "I wrote a piece for the '94 ceasefire, when John Hume and Trimble got the prize, and I wrote something when the Belfast agreement was signed. That's all good citizen work. But I stay off talk shows as I have no gift for that. I don't have many opinions. I just nod, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah' and wait for something to really happen. The greatest thing is not to believe your own prophecies and the guard against that is to have a set of fast and sceptical friends, where your language is always tested against the verity of vigilant intelligences. That's the best vaccination." As well as the Beowulf, he has translated the libretto of a Janacek song-cycle that will be staged in Dublin and London this autumn. But he says there is a sense of retrospect in his current work, "rumination, chewing-the-cud poetry". It was Auden who claimed a poet's hope to be " like some valley cheese / Local, but prized elsewhere ". It's a hope fulfilled by Heaney. He belongs to Ireland, Britain and the rest of the world. Like the other yard boy Caedmon, he was surprised by his poetic gift, but with his pen has dug deeper than he could with any spade. • To order a copy of Beowulf (rrp £14.99), published by Faber, at the special price of £11.99 + 99p UK p&p, call 0500 600 102 or send a cheque payable to Guardian CultureShop, 250 Western Avenue, London, W3 6EE. Heaney's translation of the Janacek song-cycle, The Diary of One Who Vanished, is at the National Theatre from November 3 to 6. Born: April 13 1939. Education: Anahorish School (1945-51); St Columb's college (1951-57); Queen's university, Belfast (1957-61), St Joseph's college of education (1961-62). Family: Married Marie Devlin in 1965. Three children - Michael (1966), Christopher (1967), Catherine Ann (1973). Career: Teacher at St Thomas intermediate school (1962); teacher at St Joseph's college of education (1963-66); lecturer at Queen's (1966-70); visiting professor at University of Berkeley, California (1970-71); head of English at Carysfoot college (1975-81); Professor at Harvard (1981-96). Publications: Preoccupations; essays and articles (1980); Government of the Tongue; essays (1988); The Redress of Poetry, lectures (1995). Poetry: Death of a Naturalist (1966); Door into the Dark(1969); Wintering Out (1972); North (1975); Field Work (1979); Sweeney Astray (1983); Station Island (1984); Haw Lantern (1987); The Cure at Troy (1990); Seeing Things (1991); The Spirit Level (1996); Beowulf (1999). ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. 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