Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, is out in paperback from Faber.

It is often late, by chance, and with sudden delight, that we find those poets who later become vital to us. I knew Sorley MacLean by reputation before I felt his authority. His renovation of a poetic tradition, his cross-fertilisation of love and politics, of metaphysical technique and traditional Gaelic modes, of dan direach and personal destiny – I knew about all this at second hand; it was part of that store of useful literary information that accumulates at the back of the literary mind like respected, unread books on the bookshelf. But then, in the early Seventies, two things occurred which made the spark jump: I read Iain Crichton Smith’s translations, Poems to Eimhir, and I heard MacLean himself read his own poems in the original Gaelic.’

Poem: ‘Diptych’

Seamus Heaney, 3 July 1986

I

She taught me what her uncle once taught her: How easily the biggest coal block split If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block To face the music. Teach me now to listen, To strike it rich behind the linear black.

II

I thought of...

Two Poems

Seamus Heaney, 1 November 1984

Hailstones

I

My cheek was hit and hit: sudden hailstones pelted and bounced on the road.

When it cleared again something whipped and knowledgeable had withdrawn

and left me there with my chances. I made a small hard ball of burning water running from my hand

just as I make this now out of the melt of the real thing smarting into its absence.

II

To be reckoned with, all the same, those brats...

Three Poems

Seamus Heaney, 20 October 1983

Unwinding

If the twine unravels to the very end the stuff gathering under my fingernails is being picked off whitewash at the bedside.

And the stuff gathering in my ear is their sex-pruned and unfurtherable moss-talk, incubated under lamplight,

which will have to be unlearned even though from there on everything is going to be learning.

So the twine unwinds and loosely widens backward through...

Poem: ‘The Birthplace’

Seamus Heaney, 7 October 1982

I

The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain, the single bed a dream of discipline. And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable ghost-life he carried, with no need to invent. And high trees around the house, breathed upon day and night by winds as slow as a cart coming late from market or the stir a fiddle could make in his reluctant...

Heaney was not in any simple sense a ‘Virgilian’ poet, but the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid mattered more to his later writing than any other single text.

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A Big Life: Seamus Heaney

Michael Hofmann, 4 June 2015

Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs...

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Be Nice to Mice: Henryson

Colin Burrow, 8 October 2009

Robert Henryson is the most likeable late medieval author after Chaucer. He wrote with a directness, a lightly carried learning and a lack of sentimentality hard to match anywhere in the British...

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Roaming the stations of the world: Seamus Heaney

Patrick McGuinness, 3 January 2002

In a shrewd and sympathetic essay on Dylan Thomas published in The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney found a memorable set of metaphors for Thomas’s poetic procedures: he ‘plunged into...

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Hasped and Hooped and Hirpling: Beowulf

Terry Eagleton, 11 November 1999

Writing in 1887 of the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing...

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Hand and Foot: Seamus Heaney

John Kerrigan, 27 May 1999

When Seamus Heaney left Belfast in 1972, to work as a freelance writer in the relative safety of the Republic, Northern Ireland was a war zone. Internment and Bloody Sunday had recruited so many...

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Scruples

James Wood, 20 June 1996

Seamus Heaney has always doubted poetry – not as a philosopher might doubt reality, but as a rich man might doubt money. He feels not scepticism, but guilt. He thanks poetry for existing but...

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Dazzling Philosophy

Michael Hofmann, 15 August 1991

Seeing things, Seamus Heaney’s ninth volume of new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is...

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Troubles

David Trotter, 23 June 1988

In an interview given in 1979, Seamus Heaney endorsed a fellow writer’s lament that ‘you feel bloody well guilty about writing.’ To judge by this new collection of critical...

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Excusez-moi

Ian Hamilton, 1 October 1987

‘About the only enmity I have is towards pride.’ Seamus Heaney said this in an interview, and since we know him to be the most over-interviewed of living poets, perhaps he...

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Sweaney Peregraine

Paul Muldoon, 1 November 1984

The title-sequence of Seamus Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage...

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Ireland at Swim

Denis Donoghue, 21 April 1983

The Crane Bag is a magazine, published twice a year: each issue deals with one theme. In Irish legend, the crane bag contained the alphabet of knowledge. The bag belonged to Manannan, god of the...

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Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...

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Prize Poems

Donald Davie, 1 July 1982

The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan...

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English Fame and Irish Writers

Brian Moore, 20 November 1980

In Ireland it often seems that the great world is too little with us – that all issues are reduced to the level of the parish pump. Yet, as Patrick Kavanagh warned, Irish writers turn...

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The Mouth, the Meal and the Book

Christopher Ricks, 8 November 1979

Those of us who have never swallowed an oyster have presumably never lived life to the full. The Augustan poet was not merely mocking the heroic when he said that the man must have had a palate...

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