On Seamus Heaney. By R. F. Foster

Abstract

As Northern Ireland erupted in violence in the late 1960s, Seamus Heaney commented in a newspaper piece on the delicate balance required to negotiate the chaos. ‘The ideal in politics as in writing’, he wrote, ‘is one of integrity; to establish a congruence between a man’s public image (his speeches and actions or his writings) and his private self (his inherited emotional loyalties, his evolving ideals, his prejudices and uncertainties)’. Heaney’s life-long project was the working out of that congruence between the public and private man, and the critical acclaim he enjoyed during his lifetime and his extraordinary popularity among readers were both due, in no small part, to his success in that undertaking. Beginning with a 1965 profile in Vogue magazine, of all places, and continuing through BBC radio broadcasts, public readings and interviews, his critical writings, and Stepping Stones, Heaney fashioned a highly coherent narrative that grounded his poems in his own personal history. His body of work as a whole is an assertion of a poetic persona that is familiar to his readers everywhere. As the Irish historian R. F. Foster notes at the beginning of this book, ‘It is difficult to write about someone who wrote so well about himself’.