Anger and Nostalgia: Seamus Heaney and the Ghost of the Father

Abstract

EVEN BEFORE Heaney won Nobel Prize (1995) and then delivered a bestselling translation of Beowulf(1999), he was for Irish, American, and English readers most admired and lovable of poets. He won that wide affection both by being best of all possible ambassadors for his own poetry--one of most popular readers since Frost--and by interest and beauty of his poems. Asked to give a lecture on Heaney and Yeats at an American university, I reread poems collected in Opened Ground (1998) and part of immense commentary on his work. Surprisingly, poems seemed bristling with and political commitment, far more than I recalled from reading collections as they were published. Turning to critics, I found that many (but not all) saw poems as evasive of politics, as written in sorrow not in when subject was the Troubles, evenhanded in their representations of conflict, and inclined to assert that poetry was utterly different from and perhaps helpless before politics. In such commentaries on Heaney's work imagined ethos of speaker of poem sometimes appeared to dictate how poetic speech itself was interpreted, and that ethos was beloved, genial, Irish ambassador for art of poetry. Perhaps public personality of Heaney was overriding private self that manifests itself over time in particular poems. So I gave a lecture on Heaney's with father-figures (mainly his own father, Patrick Heaney, and Yeats) and his emotional identification with generation of angry young Catholic males who came of age in 1960s in North. Many members of audience, readers and teachers of Irish literature, were quite unwilling to go along with general tendency of my talk. The question period went on and on, one objection after another: anger was not a word for how Heaney felt about his father or Yeats. His father was a quiet gentleman, affectionate with young boy whom he rode about on his shoulders (see Follower, Opened Ground, 10), and Heaney was a good son. (1) Heaney did not have feelings in common with those who joined IRA; poetry isn't part of all that. Heaney did not see Yeats as a Protestant, just as a great poet. One should not use words like republican and nationalist in neighborhood of name Seamus Heaney--this was loose and dangerous talk. It was also best not to say that poetry of Heaney is rooted in nostalgia. These are not quotations, just recollections and interpretations of lines of objection offered by audience. In a quick summary of a free-flowing discussion, it is difficult to do justice to each of them, but questions were good ones and paper has been reworked, perhaps strengthened, as a result of them. Taken together, they suggest that either talk was wrong-headed from start, or that it had touched a nerve, perhaps even a truth that was inadmissable. My point is not that either character of Heaney or his poetry should be debunked, but that a public image of poet, a whatever-you-say,-say-nothing-plainly attitude about North, and a dogma about relation between literature and politics may be enforcing certain readings of poems that are actually open both to alternative readings and to mystery. The ancient philosopher Lao Tzu once ranked kinds of great men: lowest was one who was despised, next one feared, higher still one known and loved by people, but highest of all was man barely known. Heaney may be more mysterious than readers who know and love him take him to be. I. HEANEY'S RELATION TO YEATS, 1977 I do not know Heaney well, but I did meet him once, and it may be worth it to some future biographer for me to record little incident. One reason for giving it here is to exemplify how little such anecdotes may actually reveal. In mid-September 1977 I visited Heaney, then thirty-eight years old, in Dublin. …