The ‘bushman with a brush’ who inspired two poetic greats

It’s well known that Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes shared a love of Ireland’s legends. But they also shared the decades-long friendship of an eccentric artist who seemed to have stepped out of an Irish myth, a “feral” figure who inspired and shaped their poetry, as a new trove of papers reveals.

Several never-before-seen poems by Heaney have been found among the papers of his friend, the painter Barrie Cooke, newly acquired by Pembroke College, Cambridge. This is a major literary event: it’s not every day that we discover lost work by a Nobel laureate.

What makes this still more exciting is the presence of Heaney’s letters to Cooke, “letters of astonishing openness about his creative anxieties and creative thinking”, says Dr Mark Wormald of Pembroke College. “They reveal that Barrie was a really persistent influence and instigator of poems from the time they met, at his home in 1971.”

Heaney sent Cooke at least four drafts of one untitled poem about him. The final version appeared in Heaney’s 1991 collection Seeing Things, but an early draft, made public for the first time today, offers a far ruder, earthier portrait of the artist.

In lines that do not appear in the printed version, Heaney calls Cooke a “neo-bushman-brushman,/ our squatter at the canvas”. The draft ends with an unpublished joke about Cooke urinating in public: “He squats and squats. Is he making fire or water?”

“When I first met Barrie, I wasn’t sure if it was incontinence or just defiance of morality – but he would do that,” says Dr Wormald. “He was a very visceral, almost at times feral, character.

Seamus described Barrie as a Green Man for our time… he represented the ideal freedom of the artist.”

Their friendship is buried in the published version of that poem, says Dr Wormald. “Seamus thought it very important that this friendship remained a private source of nourishment.”

To Hughes, Cooke was a “wodwo” – the mythic hairy man of the woods portrayed in his book of that name. The pair discussed characters from Irish folklore – like the death-goddess Morrigu – and fished together for pike in the river Unshin, near Cooke’s home in Co Sligo. This inspired a marvellous 16-line verse fragment, revealed today.

Hughes writes: “The Morrigu came North and standing astride/ The Unshin, she let gape the mouth of her cauldron wide/ And bagged the Dagda, like a great kicking pike, alive inside.”

Cooke illustrated both poets’ work, creating striking artworks for Hughes’s The Great Irish Pike and Heaney’s translation of the old Irish epic Sweeney Astray.

The character of Sweeney – a king driven mad and transformed into a wild, naked birdman who lives in the woods – clearly struck a chord with Cooke. He continued to paint Sweeney, and his artworks inspired Heaney to revisit the character in his book Station Island, which he began writing while staying at Cooke’s house.

Drafts sent to Cooke also shed light on the famous bog poems of Heaney’s North (1975). “The most mysterious of those bog poems, which excites and bothers critics because they don’t know what’s going on, is called Bone Dream,” says Dr Wormald. “It turns out it was very different [in an earlier draft].

“It was written for Barrie Cooke, and about Barrie’s art.”