Seamus Heaney’s Life & Works
During much of the twentieth century there was a heavy and uneasy tension between Ireland and Great Britain. The Irish were never really satisfied with English rule and so were faced with the dilemma when Great Britain entered World War I: should they fight to defend an empire they hated? Many Irish men ended up fighting for the British Empire, however others took this opportunity to “rise up against England in a bid for independence known as the Easter Rising of 1916” (Allen 1109). Although planned to be a nationwide rebellion, only a small portion of the Irish public supported the rebellion yet the extreme harshness of the British response whipped up support for the Irish nationalist cause. After a long struggle for power, the British split Ireland into two self-governing dominions: the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Independence for all but Northern Ireland was achieved in 1949 although reunification or lasting peace has never been achieved. As a result sporadic, ongoing outbursts of violence between Protestant and Catholic factions in Northern Ireland surfaced (Vedder 385). Offering a first hand perspective into this enmity, Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet who uses his poetry to bring readers to “Northern Ireland in the second half of the 20th century- while jolting us into a reapprehension of the human condition” (Kakutani). Whether he was writing about his family’s farm and the unforgiving world of nature in his earliest poems or, later on, about an Ireland ravaged by the violence of the Troubles, Seamus Heaney possessed an extraordinary ability of making the unique seem familiar, while exploring the various aspects and problems of human experience.
A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in a rural farm in County Derry. The impact of his surroundings and the details of his upbringing on his work are immense. As a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland, Heaney once described himself as someone who “emerged from a hidden, a buried life and entered the realm of education” (“Seamus Heaney”). Upon studying English at Queen’s University in Belfast, he became quickly interest in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, and Patrick Kavanagh, all of whom wrote about their local surroundings (Vedder 385). Conservative in technique, straightforward and common in diction, “Heaney's distinctive quality as a poet is that he is at once parochial and universal, grounded in particular localities and microcultures yet branching out to touch every reader” (Magil 445). At first his early poems nostalgically recall the rural act of his family and community, however, there is a transition in his poetry on which his later poems dramatize his innocent childhood coming to an end when he learned of the centuries old feud between Protestant and Catholics. Rather than depicting his childhood farm as utopian, Heaney begins to acknowledge “the many serpents that slithered through them” (Hart 123). Heaney allows Ireland’s long history of bloody conflict become his creative wound, in which he draws from his growing concern with violence amongst his people.
Seamus Heaney is considered a part of the postmodern literary movement, a period where post war writers tried to make sense of the new, fragmented world around them. For hundreds of years, Irish Literary written in English was almost entirely a part of the English literary tradition; it did not have its own identity. However, in the twentieth century, as “Ireland undertook its quest for national independence and rebounded from the devastation of the potato famine, the Irish began to take stock of their own cultural heritage” (Allen 1239). Led by William Buttler Yeats then followed by Seamus Heaney, writers of the Irish literary revival vigorously explored the question of Irish Identity. For Heaney, this meant turning to the old divisions of his nation. Growing up in a community where Catholics and Protestants lived in proximity and harmony, much of Heaney’s poetry is rooted in this landscape as it represents more than just the locale of his childhood memories (Schirmer 267). He continuously tried to root the present age in the oldest elemental patterns of the people and then relate the people to the countryside that fostered them. His goal was to blend together the Irish speech of his family and district, and the British and urban culture he acquired as a student. Heaney firmly refused to abandon any part of his culture and pursued a return of 20th century poetry to its foundation in Romantic mediations on nature and explorations (Magil 445).
Heaney’s works continuously focused on the themes of nature, self-definition and often history. In his many poems, this can be seen as he blends together both his Irish and English traditions. For Heaney, it is the Irish speech and English traditions of his family and district, overlaid by British and urban culture he acquired as a student, the norm(Ehrenpreis 386). He refuses to abandon any part of his culture, so instead he aims to identify himself in both cultures. Much of his work focuses on his childhood experiences, as Heaney is a strong believer that a person’s surrounding, particularly the environment in which they grow up, become the context for evaluation(Magil 446). He seeks to preserve both Irish and English traditions by a fusion that transcends either of them inseparably. Through this, Heaney portrays the theme of self-definition as he reveals his self-identity and searches for his purpose. In a way, Heaney felt the yeaning to be a heroic actor in the terrible drama that took place in modern Ireland (Ehrenpreis 388).
As a poet from Northern Ireland, Heaney used his work to reflect upon the "Troubles," the often-violent political struggles that plagued the country during Heaney’s young adulthood. The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). While some reviewers criticized Heaney for being an apologist and mythologizer, Morrison suggested that Heaney would never reduce political situations to false simple clarity, and never thought his role should be as a political spokesman. The author "has written poems directly about the Troubles as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman, someone looked to for comment and guidance," noted Morrison. "Yet he has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role, defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical, and questioning the extent to which poetry, however 'committed,' can influence the course of history." ( “Seamus Heaney”) His poetry embodies with “convinction and condon the poet’s struggle to come to terms with urgent political and social realities without comprosing the integretity of his art and his faith in its ability to get human truths lying” (Schirmer 267).
Many critics consider Seamus Heaney the most important Irish poet since William Buttler Yeats. He gained public recognition in 1969, with the publishing of his first book, Death of A Naturalist, a collection of poems about the experiences of his rural childhood (). In particular, “Digging”, the book’s opening poem gained instant acclaim for its devotion to the natural world, a sense of regional and family tradition () . The poem evokes Irish countryside and comments on the care and skill with which his father and ancestors farmed the land using a spade (Vedder 386). Despite having “no spade to follow men like them”, the speaker informs the reader of the extent to which “the craft and skill displayed by his father and grandfather have left on him a positive influence, as have the sights and smells of the environment, and he intends to explore further in his own manner of digging” (Jason 1346). The speaker mentions that unlike his ancestors who used a spade to farm, his tool of choice is a pen. “Digging” is essentially Heaney’s public declaration that he will break the family tradition of physical labor and pursue a career in poetry (Magil 445). Heaney comes to understand that it is possible for him to both honor his family’s history and depart from it. This was a crucial time for him in which he was able to define his identity as poet and find his purpose. Another famous work by Heaney is a poem called “The Tollund Man”, his most widely reprinted poem. The tollund man was a human sacrifice to the goddess Nerthus, the goodess of germination, to secure good crops in Jutland. Ultimately Heaney implies that “ all humans are equally involved, equally responsible, if only by complicity or failure to act” (Magil 451). He comes to the conclusion that senseless violence and complacent acceptance of it are both parts of human nature. In 1995, Seamus Heaney achieved one of his greatest accomplishments – A Nobel Prize for his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past” (Vedder 385).
Regardless of a poem’s immediate subject matter — nature, myth or contemporary Ireland — there are continuities in his work: an awareness of mortality and the precariousness of life, and an appreciation of the virtues of “keeping going,” whether he is referring to a farmer persevering in the arduous work of wresting a living from the rocky land, or people trying to cope, daily, with the violence that escalated in Northern Ireland during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.