The Great Irish Elk: Seamus Heaney's Personal Helicon

Abstract

in 1923, he was fiftyeight and at the height of his poetic powers, which happily continued undiminished for another sixteen years. Yeats wrote some of his best poems in the last years of his life, the decade and a half that followed the Nobel Prize, and in his Autobiographies he even went so far as to say that The Bounty of Sweden made him feel that though he was old his Muse was young. Seamus Heaney has long been recognized as a worthy successor to Yeats; we can hope that, in receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1995, he will share not only Yeats's honor but also his fate, and that, at the slightly younger age of fifty-six, Heaney will prove that he still has some of his best poems to write. Yeats has been the undisputed Irish national poet for most of this century, a preeminence celebrated annually at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, but Heaney is the emergent Irish national for whom another literary festival may well be founded some day. I remember it was at a Yeats International Summer School in Sligo that I first heard Seamus Heaney read his poems, and it was a moving experience because he reads so well, in a soft Ulster accent freighted with gravity but lightened by wry humor. I realized then that if Heaney could be compared with Yeats, the two poets must have more in common than their Irishness, for Yeats himself was never simply an Irish poet; he was one of the chief modern world poets as well. And if Heaney is really like Yeats, he may come to be seen as more significantly a Modern poet than an Irish poet. Indeed, it may already be happening: Heaney's poems appear regularly in such non-Irish places as the (London) Times Literary Supplement and the New Yorker, and his dual appointment to the prestigious Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and the Chair of Poetry at Oxford are proof enough that he commands wide respect outside Ireland. Americans especially appreciate Heaney, for he has lived long enough in Boston to become an honorary citizen, has had his picture in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, has delivered a commencement address in verse, no less at Fordham University, and has been featured on a special American television program for Saint Patrick's Day, introduced by his universally admired fellow-countryman, the flutist James Galway, as everybody's favorite Irish poet, as he strolled beside a stone wall in the Boyne Valley, talking of Saint Patrick's conquest of Ireland as if it had happened the day before. His own conquest of America was pictured some time ago in the pages of National Geographic magazine, which ran a photographic essay on The Mystery of the Bog, quoting Heaney's poetry almost as if it were scripture. He is already ahead of Yeats in recognition, for his honors at Oxford and Harvard elevated him to the highest position a poet can reach in the English-speaking world, before he won a still higher international honor from the Swedish Academy at Stockholm. So there is justice as well as judgment in the award of a Nobel Prize in Literature to Seamus