‘Help me please my hedge-school master’: Virgilian Presences in the Work of Seamus Heaney

Abstract

This article traces Virgilian presences in Seamus Heaney's oeuvre, from Field Work (1979) to Human Chain (2010). Virgil appears under many guises in Heaney's poetry: in work published in the mid-1970s, he is a character from The Divine Comedy; by the turn of the millennium he had become the classical author of the Eclogues and certainly of the Aeneid. The article analyses this evolution, and suggests that, while Virgil remained a guide for the poet in troubled times, the transition from a Christian to a classical Virgil reflects a movement towards secularisation and globalisation in Heaney's oeuvre.