Shortly after Seamus Heaney’s death a PR person from a semi-State body told me that she had met Heaney once, sitting beside him at a fundraising dinner. On the day of his funeral, she said, she had called in sick, turned off her phone and sat the whole day at her kitchen table, drinking tea, reading his poems and listening to the live broadcast of the funeral. I was moved by her story, not a little envious and, above all, curious: how, in our times, could a poet inspire such devotion? These two issues of the Belfast-based magazine
Irish Pages
go some way towards explaining it.
The first issue gathers a suite of obituaries and memoirs written just after his death, and these pages resonate both with the shock of his departure, experienced by his fellow poets as a death in the family, and the power and goodness of the man’s personality. Here was a truly good man, as rare as a good poet and even more rarely found together.
Manus Charleton, in a discussion of “ethical depth” in Heaney, talks of “the values associated with traditional rural living in Ireland, such as decency, kindness and generosity of spirit”. Heaney may have inherited these, but to maintain them in the larger world requires a hard-won virtue.
He was, by all accounts here, many of them American, a benevolent and supportive teacher, and a man of deep tact, but also a man ready to laugh at himself and others. Andrew O’Hagan recalls how, when asked what a future Heaney museum would contain, he drily replied: “It’ll be a few churns and a confessional box.” Robert Pinsky’s characteristically offbeat memoir relates how, over drinks one night, a group of poets devised a parlour game of portraying the deaths of great poets as represented by fingers. For John Keats the finger vibrates with coughs, then goes flat; Poe and Dylan Thomas “wheeled and reeled until the index finger representing each of them collapsed”. Pinsky confesses that “Plath putting her head in the oven was also portrayed”. And then: “Seamus knew which Irish poet had been executed by firing squad, and his fingers portrayed that awful event.”
The second issue, recently published, is devoted to Heaney’s legacy. One remarkable aspect of Heaney’s work is that, despite its currency, he seems to have had little influence on the generation of Irish poets who came after him, in terms of either form or subject matter. It is argued here that this could be due to Heaney’s complicated relationship to modernism.
He felt little affinity with poets like Eliot, and looked more to a particular Wordsworthian tradition within English poetry, with its special focus on nature. This was effective for him because of his own background, but it could hardly be of use to the poets who came after.
As Paul Muldoon points out, Heaney was a one-off. In a revealing piece published here for the first time, Heaney talks of the conflict of poetic time and actual history, and how he came to a “farcical reprise of what we might call the Oisín motif”, given his poetic affinities in an Ireland that was changing in historical time. This issue is taken up and expanded in a fascinating essay by Jahan Ramazani on Heaney and the global, which teases out the paradox of how a poet so firmly rooted in a particular place could become such a global poet, on a scale unlikely to be repeated.
If Heaney started with the notion of the poet’s task as being, as Eliot put it, rephrasing the French poet Mallarmé, to “purify the dialect of the tribe”, with the implicit connotation that he was also engaged in the poetic reconquest of Ulster, by the end of his career his true tribe had become his fellow poets in English, the guardians of the language. As Ramazani points out, so many of Heaney’s poems are actually about language itself and his real legacy may be his unparalleled fidelity to the English language, which led him back to its roots and what he called “the etymological drama”. Once, half-jokingly, he said to his brilliant Mexican translator, Pura López-Colomé, “Don’t forget I was born to be translated into Dutch.”
The inner history of the language of poetry is the history of translation, and in times to come his new Englishing of The Aeneid and his version of Beowulf may come to be seen as central to his poetic achievement.
These two issues of the magazine are, in exemplary fashion, a memorial to the man and make a start on clearing the ground for a new critical appreciation of the poet and his work.
Irish Pages, Vol 8, No 2: Heaney; Vol 9, No 1: After Heaney
Michael O’Loughlin’s most recent collection of poetry is In This Life (New Island)
