The Use of Memory: Seamus Heaney, T. S. Eliot, and the Unpublished Epigraph to North

Abstract

Over a decade before he would confront the purgatorial shade of James Joyce and other revenants of his cultural and literary inheritance in the magisterial lyric sequence "Station Island" (1985), Seamus Heaney began to free himself from the contending voices of his earliest poetic masters by engaging them from a safe distance with the measured, analytic instrument of prose. He took on Wordsworth in "Feeling into Words" (1974), Hopkins in "The Fire i' the Flint" (1974), Kavanagh in "From Monaghan to the Grand Canal" (1975), and followed suit with Yeats, Mandelstam, and Lowell. There was one imposing shade, however, who seemed destined to remain "unappeased and peregrine" and who was denied a significant place in these early essays of self-definition (CPP 141). He is wholly excluded from the list of "nurturing" literary influences that Heaney mentions during his 1977 interview with Seamus Deane and is even indicted as one of the aloof modern poets that seemed "far beyond the likes of me" several years afterward (Deane 66; Randall 14). Reflecting on the formative years of his literary life in a 1988 lecture at Harvard, Heaney admits that T. S. Eliot hovered over his early work like "a kind of literary superego" rather than a source of inspiration, an "overseeing presence" that he strove to escape rather than to assimilate into his repertoire of lyric voices (FK 39). His apparent resistance to Eliot as one of the pale, unsatisfied monarchs of modernism has been for the most part accepted among scholarly circles,1 and Heaney himself contributed to this impression as recently as October 2004, when he claimed that grappling with "the large demands and costive style of the master" created in him an "inner Eliot," an authoritative and judicious voice he wielded against his earliest antagonists ("In the Light" 14). [End Page 152] But over the course of his early career, as we shall see, his "inner Eliot" became much more than a badge of literary and cultural authority. In the months before the highly anticipated publication of North in 1975, Heaney chose to remove the epigraph he had originally used to preface part I of the volume from Eliot's Little Gidding (1942), a verse to which he would repeatedly return in the following years as its personal and literary resonance for him deepened. Postcolonial scholars have tended to focus on Heaney's attention to matters of politics, regionalism, and cultural identity, leaving relatively unexplored his intellectual allegiances to major modern poets besides Joyce and Yeats. The discovery of the unpublished epigraph offers us the occasion to rethink Heaney's literary debt to Eliot, whose influence on his early work has gone unnoticed. My aim is to examine the evidence of his earliest tutelage under Eliot in the three volumes he published before 1975—Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), and Wintering Out (1972)—and then to suggest the ways in which Eliot's understanding of memory as a generative principle of love and self-renewal influenced him (both personally and poetically) as he began to experiment with the mythologies that structure part I of North. Heaney turned to Eliot at a critical moment in his career with urgent questions about the proper "use of memory"; the answers he received helped him to recreate himself as an artist, to balance political violence and artistic imagination, and to trust in memory's generative, transfiguring potential to lead the mind toward what Eliot calls "love beyond desire" (CPP 142). I Eliot was not the only influence Heaney had hoped to escape. In a 1979 interview with Robert Druce, he admits to adopting a similar strategy to brace himself against Yeats's persistent daemon. In response to the question "How do you face up to Yeats?" he exclaims: "I don't face up to him: I turn my back...