VERY Irish poet, locked into the landscape that nurtured him and continues to inspire him . . . yet Seamus Heaney as an artist of immense simplicity and deceptive complexity has been shaped more by the diction of Hopkins and the sensibility of Robert Frost than by any of his countrymen, including Kavanagh.
Revered abroad, a working academic on the staff of at Harvard University, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, author of 10 collections of poetry, an accomplished essayist, he is the most widely read poet in the world.
Heaney's winning of the Nobel Prize had an inevitability about it which had all gathered momentum after the publication of Seeing Things in June, 1991. Ironically, Derek Walcott was honoured first, emerging four months later as the 1991 Nobel Laureate. Four years later Heaney was awarded the prize he did not need to win.
Of course he is delighted to have won it, but he has no illusions about it or himself and remains resolutely down to earth. "I have tried never to confuse recognition and celebration with achievement."
Quoting the Nobel citation which praised his work for "its lyric beauty and ethical depth" still causes him to smile openly - the phrase so obviously delights and moves him. Not surprisingly with its embarrassing reputation for vicious, personalised invective, Ireland has provided Heaney's harshest critics, many of whom refuse to acknowledge him as a responsible nationalist.
Fame came quick and east to Heaney, with Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969) and Wintering Out (1972) while North (1975) enlarging on The Tollund Man poem of the previous book proved an authorative breakthrough a strongly political volume drawing its stark images of bone and clay from the prehistory of Northern Europe. The elegaic Field Work (1979) was followed by Station Island in 1984. Three years later The Haw Lantern won the Whitbread Prize. Seeing Things in 1991 proved another landmark.
The grumbling and accusations of alleged political indifference continued, but Heaney's popularity deflected the attacks. His superb new collection, The Spirit Level published next week, is already gathering excited reviews and he is reading from it at the Abbey on Sunday night. But he has long been in the curious position of being loved by people who have not read his work, while being dismissed by others who have not read it either.
Some of his critics condemn him for having left the North in 1972, to settle first in Wicklow and later in Sandymount. Does his accessibility target him for personalised attacks? Temperament and personality, not role, determine things like aloofness and gravitas. My temperament is genetic. This is the way I am.
Gentle, relaxed, charming, Heaney is a shrewd, hard working, self made man with a quick, instinctive feel amounting to genius for language, he possesses an extraordinary gift for deft linguistic gear changes, just as he draws his themes from a variety of sources including classical Greek and early Irish literature. In 1983, his version of the medieval epic Buile Suibhne was published as Mad Sweeney, in the first complete translation since 1913.
In conversation, Heaney's language glides effortlessly between the colloquial and poetic formality. His art, his criticism and his teaching are all the result of a fastidious, scholarly application. Nor is there anything complacent about his approach to lyric poetry. He is careful because vigilance and realism are qualities he inherited by growing up in the North between two warring cultures. As he remarked of his native territory in Crediting Poetry, his Nobel acceptance speech: "No place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration." Recalling the eel fisherman in Casualty, the narrator remembers deliberately avoiding poetry as a topic And, always politic/And shy of condescension, /I would manage by some trick/To switch the talk to eels/Or lore of the horse and cart/Or the Provisionals."
Because of the ease of his technical skill - and he admits himself "people comment on the technique, but I am never too conscious of it. I tend to feel a sonnet in my body, rhymes and metres are muscular, in fact, a musculature of sorts" - his work has, at times, seemed too comfortable, too beautiful, too poised. It is certainly instantly recognisable: his work lives through his distinctive, beguiling rhythmic voice. You hear a Heaney poem rather than simply read it.
Yet his poetry is intense and concentrated relentlessly, gracefully exact. There is an essential sternness about it even at, its most elegaic. "Tone", he says, "is more important than context."
Racing around the garden and hurling himself at the side gate in protest, Carlo the family dog is enough to drown Heaney's greeting. Although the poet smiles and is as kindly as ever, there is a resigned weariness as he laces yet another interview and slowly leads the way into the calmly chaotic kitchen to make tea and search for the sugar. The story of his life is already so familiar. From Mossbawn farm, where his father was a cattle dealer, to the move to Bellaghy four or five miles away, to another farm, The Wood, when he was 14 ... There was the early promise as a scholarship boy at St Columb's in Derry and on to Queen's; then teaching, to be followed by an academic career which has run more or less parallel to his art.
Heaney the poet and obsessive collector of art gallery and museum postcards, has also been Boylston Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric at Harvard since 1984.
IN 1990 when being interviewed, about The Cure At Troy, his version of Sophocles's Philoctetes and his first venture into theatre, he was relieved to hear I was intending only to ask him about writing for the stage no questions about his life. "That's good. I've read so often about being born on a farm in Derry, even I don't believe it anymore." Interviews are no easier now. More likely to talk about a wooden bowl or archaeology than himself or the prize he seems to refer to mainly as "it", he is a most approachable, if mercurial, interviewee. The work supplies answers beyond most, questions.
"Stepping Stones" is a phrase he often uses, and it describes the stages of his career. It also provides the title for a reading of his work he recorded a year ago. The personal selection underlines the fluidity of his work and is particularly fascinating to the link narrative which accompanies the reading, which not only plots the development of his canon, but offers an interpretation of the recent tragic, history of the North. The interpretation is controlled and understated, yet vivid, compounded by the graphic violence of some of the images.
His outrage sounds out in Ugolino, his dramatic reworking of Dante. `You', I shouted, `you on top, what hate/Makes you so ravenous and insatiable?/What keeps you so monstrously at rut?/Is there any story I can tell/For you, in the world above, against him? (From Field Work).
Almost six months after winning the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, he is still at the mercy of fame's demands and is answering his mail as quickly as he can but a few boxes full of congratulations remain to be thanked; speeches are waiting to be written, including a commencement address for the University of North Carolina: all of it is interfering with the writing of poetry.
His new collection, The Spirit Level, with its thematically diverse works Mycenae Lookout; The Flight Path and Tollund, a return to The Tollund Man of Wintering Out, was completed early last summer, long before news of the prize. "It's just as well. It is impossible to work at the moment. I've only written about five or six poems since all the fuss happened, with its laps of honour. I'm a bit overwhelmed," he says and looks bewildered, almost cornered, remarking that the pressure of correspondence has driven him from his attic study down to a conservatory overlooking the garden.
He enjoys his house in Sandymount, and while there is a threat all the books might rebel for more space, he is content to stay here. It's taken me almost 20 years to colonise the place."
He is an easy, slyly witty talker, but the facts of his life which features powerfully in his work are not preferred conversational topic. He married Marie Devlin in 1965 and they have three grown children: Heaney seems, slightly shocked to realise their eldest will be 30 in July. The poet reached 57 on April 13th and his new collection is marked by a sense of reentering, reassessing, returning to a younger self as an older person. "I found it taking purchase on an older, speaking self."
There is also an anger, a quality not usually associated with his work, although it has been often present. "One of the things about getting older is that people disappoint you. There is an anger about concessions made." In Keeping Going, addressed to his brother Hugh, the question is asked after a life time of work, is this all? As it was/In tie beginning, is now and shall be?
CAUTION and adventure have always featured in his work. He agrees these traits are central to his personality. The robust, stocky Heaney was an athletic young man thanks to working on the farm and playing a lot of football. He was also a sprinter, competing over 220 yards and 440 yards as those distances were then known. "I was speedy enough." But a calf injury ended that. "I became aware of this weakness, so I began to hold something back."
For all the awards and international recognition, Heaney has suffered in Ireland largely through his own unaffected personality and the ease with which his career progressed. There are some who resent his lack of agony and personal crisis. There have been no public dramas; no tantrums; no weakness. His poetry is palpably autobiographical, yet not confessional aside from his frequent questioning of what he views as a passivity, Forgive the way I have lived indifferent -/forgive my circumspect involvement (From Station Island).
Solid, constant and disciplined, he agrees his work has, been dominated by a search for self definition. As a schoolboy he was sent home on the death of a younger brother. I saw him/For the first time in six weeks. Paler now/Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple./He lay in the four foot box as in his cot./No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear./A four foot box, a foot for every year. (Mid Term Break from Death of a Naturalist).
Explaining that choice of title for his first collection, he says it had nothing to do with acknowledging the tension between the natural, physical world of his childhood and the move towards an internal life. "No, I chose it for the melodrama of using a word like `death'. That's all."
His awareness of death began early; I shouldered a kind of manhood/stepping in to lift the coffins/of dead relations. (Funeral bites from North). The remarkable squarings section from Seeing Things, with its set of four 12 line "sonnet" sequences, is among his finest work, and was written soon after the death of his parents. Death in various guises is the dominant theme of Lightenings and Settings, while Crossings evokes the essential passage of dying and death, the sense of moving on. In one of the sonnets, a story from the annals, in which a ship appears in the air above Clonmacnoise, is quoted. Its anchor is caught on the altar rails: the vessel is trapped. A crewman attempts to free it. The abbot observes: "This man can not bear our life down here and will drown."
Elsewhere, Heaney speaks of Thomas Hardy pretending to be dead while lying down in a field of sheep. Further on, in the Crossings sequence, he notes: "Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin/For a long time afterwards appears most coarse.
"Images from my earliest experiences as a child have been vital to my writing, but even though the poems had this definite base in autobiography, I always wanted them to be more than just an annotation of the facts of my life." His poetry examines memory as both static incident caught in dime and something open to reinvestigation, further interpretations. "For while it is true that a poem preserves an experience, it should also open experience up, move it "along, make it current, carry the poet and the reader along on the escalator of the language and its associations."
REMOTE and quiet, the presence of his father has always featured in his work and in this new book as well as a playful Heaney senior urging Run, son, like the devil/And tell your mother to try/To find me a bubble for the spirit level/ And a new knot for this tie. (The Errand). Heaney sits and remembers him. "My father was a silent presence. It was not easy with him for many years. But I don't want to give the impression that he was a severe figure of authority. He bottled things up all right maybe, but oddly that gave him a sort of dignity. I've begun to realise that he must have been very worried a lot of the time. There were a lot of us. Maybe I didn't know him that well. It was only later that I realised he had been an orphan, raised by these bachelor uncles. There had been no womanly presence in his life as a youth. To me he was always grey haired, but he was only 35 when I was born.
The young Heaney enjoyed the privilege of being the first child of nine. "But not for long - the others tallowed quickly, more or less every year or so. It was a happy childhood.
He has written about his early relationship with his mother in the Clearances sequence from The Haw Lantern: When all the others were away at Mass/I was all hers as we peeled potatoes . . . Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives/Never closer the whole rest of our lives. Childhood memories are transposed on to the death bed scene. "Mother's family were preoccupied with decorum, they had a great sense of correctness, without being socially anxious.
She died suddenly in 1984. "My mother had a stroke. It was a `happy death'. All the family was at the bedside, the priest had attended her. It was the kind of end all that generation prayed for."
What was she like? "Forthright, candid, and kindly." Patrick Heaney died within two years of his wife. As his son says, "he stopped".
In Crediting Poetry, Heaney speaks of having to conduct oneself as a poet "in a situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation. A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such, but of, political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups." Can he explain why Irish novelists and playwrights do not appear to have to fulfil the political obligation expected of poets? "The word `poet' is still sacred. It has an archaic force. It implies some kind of given authority. But then, there is the long tradition, in Irish and in English, of poets as guardians and prophets of the national myths. Poetry is also replenishing."
On leaving Queen's, "It was and is a British University", he began teaching at St Thomas Intermediate School in Ballymurphy. The principal there was the short story writer and novelist, Michael McLaverty. Heaney has called him a fosterer. In a poem he recalls being "newly cubbed in language" band records the olden man's words, `Listen. Go your own way./Do your own work ... Don't have the veins buldging in your biro.'. . . He discerned the lineaments of patience everywhere/And fostered me and sent me out, with words /Imposing on my tongue like obols," (Fosterage, from North). He advised the young poet to "look for the intimate thing". It is advice which Heaney has heeded throughout beautiful, just and crafted art, ever exploring the magic of the ordinary.
