Seamus Heaney: Nobel prize-winning poet
1939-2013
SEAMUS Heaney, who has died aged 74 after a short illness, won the 1995 Nobel prize for literature, created a bestseller from a translation of Beowulf (1998) and sold more books in Britain than any other living poet. The common charge that he was too easy — “far from unfathomable”, as one critic put it — was a backhanded compliment to his democratic lyrical powers.
Poetry, Heaney remarked, “begins in delight and ends in self-consciousness”— a very different conception from that school of poetry that begins in misery and ends in existential doubt. The truth of Heaney’s poetry was to be found in finely observed details — the “mass and majesty of the world” encapsulated in “the small compass of a cast-iron stove-lid”. In its Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy noted the “ethical depth” of works “which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”.
Heaney wrote, of course, in English and in the rooted English poetic tradition of Milton, Wordsworth and Hopkins. His exploration of the language was relentless not only in his own poetry, but also in translations into English of such works as an old Irish version of the Sweeney legend or the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson. His acclaimed translation of Beowulf took a treasure trove of Anglo-Saxon out of the academic lecture halls and introduced it to a wider audience.
Heaney was taken to British hearts as the country’s leading poet and his poems became a staple of the school curriculum: poems of childhood from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), and his more complex bog poems from Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). Yet he confessed that, when he lectured at Harvard or Oxford, he was tempted to call his lectures “doing English” — almost as though he were a detached spectator and English a foreign tongue.
And so, in a sense, it was. Heaney was a poet of Irish Catholic, nationalist experience, a farm boy from Derry, and English, in the mythology of Irish nationalism, is the language of imperialist oppression. It was from the tension between worlds — past and present, Irish and English, farm and academia — that he twisted his poetry. In negotiating what he called the “double reality” of Ireland and England, he found an impish delight in subverting cultural nostrums and expectations. In Sweeney Astray, Gaelic pre-plantation place names are translated into what sound like Protestant Ascendancy place names. His Beowulf has a northern accent.
There was never much doubt about where Heaney’s patriotic sympathies lay. What he called his “off-centre” cultural allegiance led him to rebuff the laureateship, and in 1982 he objected to his inclusion in a book of British poets with the warning lines: Be advised, my passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen, and the emphatic ending: British, no, the name’s not right./ Yours truly, Seamus.
Yet his political position was perhaps more accurately conveyed in the pseudonym Incertus (uncertain) under which he published his earliest poems. For him, the crude certainties of the Republican nationalist narrative were always subverted by the personal and his deep sense of a common humanity.
The eldest of nine children, Heaney was born on a farm in Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland, on April 13 1939 — a time when Roman Catholics were conscious of being politically marginalised in a Unionist state. He grew up on the family farm where what counted was skill with a spade or a plough. Poetry came to him through his ears, not from the family’s paltry collection of books— sing-songs and recitations on St Patrick’s Day, the BBC Shipping Forecast, the “enforced poetry” of the Catholic litany and his mother singing Scottish ballads.
It was a life he evoked affectionately in poems such as Sunlight (a vision of his Aunt Mary baking bread), or Clearances , written after his mother Margaret’s death.
Heaney went to the local school, which was attended by both Protestants and Catholics, and while there the 1947 Northern Ireland Education Act was passed, giving increased access to higher education for children of poorer families.
He won a scholarship to board at St Columb’s College, a clerical-run school in Derry city, where he became head prefect and where contemporaries included the politician and fellow Nobel prize-winner John Hume, writer Seamus Deane and playwright Brian Friel.
At Queen’s University in Belfast, Heaney read English literature, wrote “a little bit of poetry” and was a star student. When he was offered the opportunity to go to Oxford, it seemed a step too far for a country boy from Derry and he took a job teaching while taking a postgraduate course at Queen’s.
In the early 1960s, his poems began to be published in the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times, and Heaney became a member of a set of young Belfast poets called The Group. In 1964 he published a slim volume called Eleven Poems. He married Marie Devlin, a fellow teacher, in 1965.
Acclamation came almost instantly. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, published by Faber and Faber, attracted astonishing reviews for a first collection.
In all, he published 13 collections of poetry, several volumes of essays and (with Ted Hughes) edited The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, anthologies dedicated to poetry as carnival.
Heaney and his wife, Marie, had two sons and a daughter. — © The Daily Telegraph, London