Responsibilities

Rooted in the poetry and prose of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and drawing heavily on unpublished material, this final chapter, Chapter 5, finds Seamus Heaney in another university setting, this time in Oxford. Taking its cue from Heaney’s own interest, in The Redress of Poetry, in the question of responsibility, it examines the complex intersections of the imagination with the challenges of contemporary society and the burden of history. It brings Heaney into dialogue with figures as diverse as Coleridge, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Raymond Williams, and it charts the development of two key poems, ‘The Diviner’ and ‘Markings’, in order to illuminate his various expressions of the fraught but necessary interactions between the private artist and their social world.

Education and the Radio

Seamus Heaney was, by first profession, a teacher, and education is an abiding preoccupation in his writing. Rooted in the radio work he undertook in the mid-1970s for the BBC Northern Ireland Schools Service, notably Explorations, a series on which he collaborated with his friend David Hammond, Chapter 3 considers the breadth of his thinking on teaching and learning. As a member of one of the first eleven-plus generations in Northern Ireland, his views on education are conditioned by the political reforms of the era, as they were felt by the nationalist community. They are profitably read through Richard Hoggart’s seminal analysis The Uses of Literacy (1957), and his later collaboration with Ted Hughes on The Rattle Bag (1982).

Images of Belfast

Seamus Heaney lived for over a decade in Belfast. The city was the site of many formative experiences and he began his career as a poet there, yet his work betrays little fondness for it. This chapter examines Heaney’s evolving relationship with Belfast at a critical moment in the city’s recent history, through his prose, poetry, and work for television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It stresses the importance of other places, specifically Berkeley and Madrid, in reforming his view of Belfast and, informed by contemporary visual theory, it looks closely at his responses to violence in poetry and visual art, and especially the work of Goya, in his developing exploration of the ethics of representation.

Publishing in London

London was the centre of Seamus Heaney’s publishing life. Chapter 1 considers his early work as it appeared in British publications in the early and mid-1960s, before his first volume, Death of a Naturalist, was published by Faber in 1966. Taking into account early reviews and essays, it focuses on his work in three publications: the New Statesman, the Listener, and Vogue, and it asserts the importance of relationships with key editors and fellow writers, notably Karl Miller and Polly Devlin. It includes analysis of images which accompanied Heaney’s work in these magazines, notably a portrait of the poet by Norman Parkinson, and it establishes critical principles for contextual readings of his poetry which are maintained throughout the book.

Introduction

In December 1966, Seamus Heaney appeared alongside Roy McFadden on a BBC Northern Ireland radio programme called ‘Two Poets’.1 Broadcast at the end of the year which had seen the publication of Death of a Naturalist, Heaney was already looking ahead to his second collection—the poems read on the programme would all appear in ...

The University and the Canon

Developing the concern with the place of education in Seamus Heaney’s work, Chapter 4 follows him to America in the 1980s and considers at length the impact on his poetry of the fourteen years he spent in the English Department at Harvard. This is a period in which Heaney’s aesthetic range is broadening, opening to international influences, and absorbing and expressing political realities in new ways. However, it is also a time of self-assertion and resistance, as he recognized in retrospect. Teaching in the US during the canon wars and exposed to the provocative discourses of literary theory, he retreats into his own certainties and convictions about language and tradition.