Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 1

Introduction

While a literary scene in which the provinces revolve around the centre is demonstrably a Copernican one, the task of talent is to reverse things to a Ptolemaic condition. The writer must re-envisage the region as the original point. —Heaney, “The Regional Forecast” Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind. —Heaney, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland

SEAMUS HEANEY’S REGIONAL IMAGINATION

Seamus Heaney observed, “John Keats once called a poem [of his] ‘a little Region to wander in,’”1 and notions of the region lie at the heart not only of his concept of poetry but also of his understanding of politics, culture, and spirituality. Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

1

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 2

2

SE A M U S HE A NEY ’S RE GIONS

the 1995 Nobel Prize winner to become a poet, while his home region of Northern Ireland produced the subject matter for much of his poetry, which explores, records, and preserves both the disappearing agrarian life of that region and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and then the outbreak of the “Troubles” there beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the late 1990s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that had long beset this region, and by extension the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom, would be synthesized and resolved. There was a third region he committed himself to explore—the spirit region, that world beyond our ken—and many of his poems, essays, and other works also probe the boundaries of this region. Heaney’s regions — the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one—offer the best entrée into and unified understanding of his tremendous body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. There is a rough trajectory across these three regions toward the spiritual, which seems natural, as the poet had aged and survived a major stroke in August 2006, but often these three regions interpenetrate and inform each other. In his early seventies, for instance, he continued to write of his childhood region along with incidents in the Northern Irish Troubles, even as he dreamt of rapprochement in the North and imagined the spirit region in the long sequence from Human Chain (2010) entitled “Route 110.” In Heaney’s hands notions of the region and regionalism reached their fullest and most profound development in literary history, as he explored these three regions through a variety of genres and forms, perhaps most supremely through his adaptation of Dante’s inherently regional form of terza rima into his particular tercet variant on that form, which itself became his chosen “region” to dwell in. In 1983, Seamus Deane, a contemporary of Heaney’s from Northern Ireland, argued in an important, albeit somewhat misleading essay, “The Artist and the Troubles,” that writers of Heaney’s generation, particularly those from the Catholic minority in the North, faced particular pressures to engage with the recent conflict in the province. He further held that Heaney, in particular, had done so by drawing on both an immediate concept of the region and a transcendent one:

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 3

Introduction

3

Seamus Heaney’s work, which began in a regionalism of the kind which had seemed to have passed with [painter William] Conor and [novelist and short-story writer Michael] McLaverty, suddenly expanded into the historical dimension with Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) with such incandescent energy and force that it was immediately clear that here, in this work, the Northern imagination had finally lost its natural stridency (replaced by patience) and had confronted its violent origins. Heaney’s best work is a contemplation of root and origin — of words, names, stories, practices, of violence itself. In him, Ulster regionalism realizes itself most fully and, in so doing, transcends itself.2

Unfortunately, Deane’s contention that Heaney’s first two books were essentially ahistorical is patently false: both Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969) do not celebrate a bucolic, timeless ideal of Ireland but bear witness to its nightmarish history. The narrative of that particular violent history of the North of Ireland is then amplified and expanded in Wintering Out and North as Heaney turns increasingly to other northern societies such as ancient Denmark, in order to draw parallels with the intimate violence then being committed within and outside the “tribes” of contemporary Northern Ireland. Deane does not clarify or elucidate his last, telling remark about Heaney’s best work being the apogee of Ulster realism yet also transcending it, but I would posit that a truer sentence has never been written about Heaney’s regionalism. As Heaney himself stated, “Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.”3 This project takes up Deane’s articulation of how Heaney’s earlier work enables the fullest realization of “Ulster regionalism” and transcends it, a crucial endeavor not only for fully appreciating the trajectory of Heaney’s work but also for understanding, by extrapolation, how it both reflects the peril and promise of divided Northern Ireland and anticipates its eventual emergence from the dark days of the Troubles into a less divided society that nonetheless remains riven with sectarianism. This sort of regionalism accords with that called for by the poet John Montague: “The real position for a poet is to be a global-regionalist. He is born into allegiances to particular areas or places and people, which he loves, sometimes against his will. But then he also happens to belong to an increasingly accessible world. . . .

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 4

4

SE A M U S HE A NEY ’S RE GIONS

So the position is actually local and international.”4 As Dennis O’Driscoll has observed, “This attitude is alert to the political, economic and environmental upheavals which uproot people and force them into new imaginative relationships with their native places. The universal informs the particular and vice versa.”5 Regionalism as Heaney imagined it played a crucial role in this devolution of the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland and in the development of his own work. Writing in the mid-1980s about the poet John Crowe Ransom, who hailed from the American South, Heaney precisely articulates why he has devoted so much of his literary criticism to the work of regional writers— to affirm his own regional body of work and to connect it to that of other regional writers. He first points out that “Ransom was at a detached angle to what he cherished. He was in two, maybe three places at once: in the parochial south, within the imposed Union, and inside the literary ‘mind of Europe.’”6 So too had Heaney been at such a “detached angle”: he was fully of his local parish, but he grew up within the “imposed Union” of Northern Ireland and the rest of Great Britain and increasingly dwelled within the “literary ‘mind of Europe,’” as his later deep reading in the work of the Italian poet Dante and the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz shows. Because he occupied such places, sometimes simultaneously, Heaney found it helpful to turn to similar writers who had done so successfully, like Ransom. In this same essay, he further argues that because of his peripheral position the southern poet took on “poetic challenges and their resolutions [that] were tactical, venturesome, and provisional,” concluding, “His plight was symptomatic of the double focus which the poet from a regional culture is now likely to experience, caught between a need to affirm the centrality of the local experience to his own being and a recognition that this experience is likely to be peripheral to the usual life of his age. In this situation, the literary tradition is what links the periphery to the centre — wherever that imaginary point may be—and to other peripheries.”7 Thus the poet from a region with such multiple allegiances must turn to “the literary tradition” to affirm the importance of “local experience” that is often rendered peripheral, especially in our own increasingly homogenized and homogenizing world—and to link that experience to those of others who similarly value local culture. Although Heaney’s immersion in the local rural life of southern County Derry in the 1940s and 1950s likely contributed more than any other fac-

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 5

Introduction

5

tors to his positive, complex view of the region, regional literary exemplars such as Robert Frost (with some qualifications), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Kavanagh, and Ted Hughes actually led him to start writing poetry seriously in the 1960s and to consider his home ground as a positive and natural source for that poetry. In the 1970s, he pointed out that “several poets in the English tradition have nurtured me—Frost, Hopkins[,] and Ted Hughes, for example.”8 Later, in his lecture Room to Rhyme, he related the story in the Venerable Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English People” about the first English poet, Caedmon, who received his call to become a poet relatively late in life and linked his own vocation to hearing regional voices from Ireland and Britain: At the relatively advanced age of twenty-three, I heard the equivalent of the voice [from Caedmon’s dream] telling me to make room to rhyme and to sing. This happened when I began to read contemporary Irish and English and Scottish and Welsh poets, people like Patrick Kavanagh and Ted Hughes and R[.] S[.] Thomas and Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown, and began to feel that my own experience was fit material to work with. Suddenly I felt that my own voice could make itself heard as it was, a voice with a local accent, but like the voices of those mummers [he has earlier discussed the Irish Christmas mummers’ tradition] one that had inherited something of [the] language of the Globe and of the Irish language that English had long since replaced.9

Susan Stewart’s reading of Caedmon’s discovery of his vocational calling illuminates our understanding of Heaney’s likening of his own call to that of the earliest English poet, whom he perceived as the first regional poet, as we will see below. She argues that “Caedmon’s legend gives an account of poetic suasion that is reciprocal—the demand precedes the composition and is not an artifact of composition. . . . When poet and listener are engaged in this scene, they turn to the intersubjective task of making significance, of pointing to meaning.”10 Such poetry, like Heaney’s, eschews solipsism in meaning making and thus establishes an inherently ethical position in its appeal to the Other. This ethic undergirds my entire regionalist argument about Heaney’s writing in this study, which assumes that his work always seeks to make meaning and to communicate that meaning to others, forming provisional communities of writer and audience.

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 6

6

SE A M U S HE A NEY ’S RE GIONS

Heaney’s call to poetry, then, stems from and is freighted with an ethical sense of his obligation to others to communicate meaning and form community, whether in the actual region of the North of Ireland, an imagined future North, or the spirit region. At this point, the New England poet Frost, who spent significant time early in his career in England and who has been placed in the tradition of the regionally oriented Wordsworth and Hardy in valuing local culture, was important to Heaney, even as he admitted some reservations about Frost’s public persona and acknowledged that Frost had a troubling tendency toward literary self-consciousness.11 Frost’s assertion in 1918 that “the colloquial is the root of every good poem” exemplified a salutary position for Heaney, despite his later insistence that “even Frost, for all his insistence on his own accent, cleared his throat, as if to remind English poetry that he had read his Virgil.”12 Similarly, he told Karl Miller that “there was a stand-up performer’s patter that became tedious, a way of not caving in to academic jargon.”13 Nevertheless, Heaney’s earliest and more recent readers have noticed Frost’s presence throughout his poetry. For instance, Robert Buttel, author of the first monograph on Heaney, argues that Frost offered “the validation he required” because of his excellence “at rendering physical detail and sense experience,” his facility with handling “traditional forms but [ones] charged with the rhythms of natural speech,” his balanced view of malign and benign forces at work in nature, the “human pain and tragedy” of rural people, the combination of “matter of fact with transcendental inclinations,” and “the appreciation of native skills and disciplines which have their correspondences to the art of poetry.”14 And as Daniel W. Ross has observed, “Frost was not, for Heaney, an acquired taste: even his earliest essays contain praises for Frost that indicate an early and pervasive influence.”15 Heaney himself noted that “when I first came to his poetry, the side of Frost that absolutely riveted me was his resolute down-to-earthness—the Frost of things-as-they-are.”16 The directness of Frost in his steadfast gaze at daily life, replete with all its tragedies and joys and expressed in his perspicuous language, confirmed for Heaney that he could employ direct language to reflect the ordinary life of his region. Frost’s great pleasure in rural labor also spoke to Heaney, who similarly enjoyed the hard work of agrarian tasks such as cutting hay with a

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 7

Introduction

7

scythe on his parents’ farm. For instance, he has praised Frost’s “Mowing,” recalling, I myself had recently learnt to mow and took pride in my ability to sharpen and handle a scythe. Come to think of it, there was a special kind of scythe shaft they often used in County Derry—and Frost of course was a Derry boy too—another connection there—a scythe that had a shaft with a curve in it. This curved handle was for some reason called a “Yankee sned” and it gave you a longer, lower sweep and cut. Anyway, I loved to mow, and I loved to hear and watch other people mow, even when I had to fall in behind and lift and bind oats or grass-seed at the heels of the mower—the “swale,” as Frost called it. So his poem meant a lot to me just because it described the particular sound of the blade in grass.17

Thus Frost modeled and affirmed for the young Heaney a connection to the earth, particularly the pleasures of hard rural labor—and the unique sounds of that work—that he was learning in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Yet in Stepping Stones Heaney told Dennis O’Driscoll that despite his appreciation for Frost’s “primal reach into the physical” and his “covenant with the reader, an openness, an availability” (SS, 453), “I don’t think of him as genetically important to my voice—Hopkins was far more important” (454). He even admitted that by the time he was reading Frost’s poetry such as “Out, Out—,” in his second or third year at Queen’s University, “I was already a slave to Hopkins” (36). And indeed, in terms of finding his voice and adjusting it to reflect local speech in his native province, he noted, “What had put me in step with myself and tuned my performance was what I heard coming through in poems by Hopkins, Ted Hughes and Patrick Kavanagh, things spoken in a way I might have heard them spoken in my own provincia by people who would hardly so much as open a book.”18 In “Feeling into Words,” Heaney therefore observed that “the result of reading Hopkins at school was the desire to write, and when I first put pen to paper at university, what flowed out was what had flowed in, the bumpy alliterating music, the reporting sounds and ricocheting consonants typical of Hopkins’s verse.”19 Recalling an early, uncollected poem of his entitled “October Thought,” and comparing it to Hopkins’s unique music, he lamented, “Some frail

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 8

8

SE A M U S HE A NEY ’S RE GIONS

bucolic images foundered under the chainmail of the pastiches: ‘Starling thatch-watches, and sudden swallow / Straight breaks to mud-nest, home rest rafter . . .’ and then there was ‘heaven-hue, plum-blue and gorse-pricked with gold’ and ‘a trickling tinkle of bells well in the fold.’ ”20 Heaney’s recourse to Hopkins’s tendency to jam nouns together would later reinforce his desire to translate the Old English epic Beowulf (and to insist on its essentially regional nature), which revels in such grammatical features. Despite his self-critique here, however, he insists that “there was a connection, not obvious at the time, but, on reflection, real enough, between the heavily accented consonantal noise of Hopkins’s poetic voice, and the peculiar regional characteristics of a Northern Ireland accent.”21 Musing further, he observes that accents in Northern Ireland are “energetic, angular, hard-edged, and it may be because of this affinity between my dialect and Hopkins’s oddity that those first verses turned out as they did.”22 In his essay on Hopkins, Heaney privileges his “philological and rhetorical passion,” pointing out that, like Ben Jonson’s poetry, “his verse is ‘rammed with life,’ butting ahead instead of hanging back into its own centre.”23 Going on to praise Hopkins’s “masculine powers of powerful and active thought,” Heaney finally argues that “his own music thrusts and throngs and it is forged. It is the way that words strike off one another, the way they are drilled, marched, and countermarched, rather than the way they philander and linger among themselves, that constitutes his proper music.”24 Many years later, Heaney would praise Hopkins’s “sense of the powerline of English language trembling under the actual verse line. The sense of big voltage.”25 So going back to his earliest attempts at writing poetry in the 1950s and continuing through his days at Queen’s University, when he “used to carry around the old Penguin edition of Hopkins’s poems edited by W. H. Gardner” (SS, 39), Heaney valued the Victorian poet’s philological underpinnings and passion along with the way he controlled that power through his precise forms. Hopkins’s influence on Heaney has been downplayed and generally neglected in the extensive criticism on the Nobel Prize winner, but Heaney consistently viewed Hopkins’s example as essential for finding his own regional voice, tuned to the rough energies and cadences of Northern Ireland speech.26 Moreover, Heaney found in Hopkins’s poetry a reclamation of preReformation rural English Catholicism, which confirmed him as a Catholic poet from the countryside. He said that despite Hopkins’s scholarly

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 9

Introduction

9

bent, his poetry “is grounded in the insular landscape which, in the month of May, blooms and greens in a way that is still Marian, sacramental, medieval English Catholic.”27 For a poet beginning to devote himself not only to promoting his home region but also to recovering the Catholic subculture of that region, Hopkins’s example was doubly salutary. Heaney identified 1962 as the year in which he first read both Patrick Kavanagh and Ted Hughes. He recalled that “I was sort of pupped out of Kavanagh. I read him in 1962, after I’d graduated from Queen’s and was teaching at St. Thomas’s, where my headmaster was the short-story writer Michael McLaverty. He lent me Kavanagh’s Soul for Sale, which includes ‘The Great Hunger,’ and at that moment the veil of the study was rent: it gave me this terrific breakthrough from English literature into home ground.”28 Kavanagh was himself from the old nine-county region of Ulster (County Monaghan), and his grittiness and specific attention to the local resonated deeply with Heaney. He told Seamus Deane in 1977 that Kavanagh had given him and other Irish writers “a confidence in the deprivations of our condition. It is to do with an insouciance and trust in the clarities and cunnings of our perceptions. . . . [Kavanagh modeled] the need to be open, unpredictably susceptible, lyrically opportunistic.”29 Heaney wrote multiple essays about Kavanagh, and the Monaghan poet helped inspire his interest not only in the cultural and geographical region but also in what I have termed elsewhere his “mental regionalism,” a “new, imagined country of the poet’s mind [that] offers a potential site of deep rapprochement and reconciliation . . . a proleptic correlative to a realistic region where the province’s inhabitants might live in harmony.”30 Kavanagh’s proclivity for including dialect words and typically Ulster speech patterns in his poetry also affirmed Heaney in his similar inclinations. Heaney’s well-known last line from “Digging,” collected in Death of a Naturalist, about his desire to use his pen as a writer—“I’ll dig with it”— suggests his fine ear for local speech by stressing “it” more than any word in the line (DN, 2). The Australian poet Les Murray has said that he told Heaney, “You couldn’t say that in English English,” meaning standard spoken English, and that Heaney agreed with him. Murray further observed that Heaney was putting his “own stamp of Ulster English on” the poem with this concluding emphasis on “it.”31 While Kavanagh’s savage antipastoral “The Great Hunger,” combined with his well-known embrace of parochialism, including the living local

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 10

10

SE A M U S HE A NEY ’S RE GIONS

language, led Heaney to examine his “home ground” with both affection and skepticism, Hughes’s “live energy” convinced Heaney he could inject a similarly rough voltage and confidence into his own verse about local culture—and that he could use the English language to do so.32 Shortly after Hughes’s death, Heaney connected him explicitly to Caedmon through their shared northern English regionalism, observing sagely that “this modern poet from Yorkshire who published in the 1960s a poem called The Bull Moses would have had no difficulty hitting it off with Caedmon, the first English poet, who began life as a farmhand in Northumbria, a fellow northerner with a harp in one hand and a bundle of fodder under the other.”33 Heaney deftly renders Caedmon as the original regional poet here even as he links Hughes to him—and by extension himself to both poets. Noting that “in 1962 the current began to flow,” he remembers “taking down Ted Hughes’s Lupercal from the shelves of the Belfast public library and opening it at ‘View of a Pig,’ and immediately going off and writing a couple of poems that were Hughes pastiches almost.”34 Moreover, if Kavanagh led Heaney to write about his home ground, Hughes enabled him to feel at home in the English language with all its roughness and echoes of Anglo-Saxon cadences. Heaney told John Haffenden that Hughes’s “energy comes out in the quality of the diction, powerful, violent diction, and there’s a kind of anger at work. Hughes’s voice . . . is in rebellion against a certain kind of demeaned, mannerly voice. . . . The manners of that speech, the original voices behind that poetic voice, are those of literate English middle-class culture, and I think Hughes’s great cry and call and bawl is that English language and English poetry is longer and deeper and rougher than that.”35 Elsewhere, Heaney likened Hughes to the Gawain poet, arguing that Hughes’s “diction is consonantal, and it snicks through the air like an efficient blade, marking and carving out fast definite shapes”; furthermore, he noted that his “consonants . . . take the measure of his vowels like calipers, or stud the line like rivets.”36 Hughes’s home county of Yorkshire, on the periphery of the London-centered literary culture, likely also exemplified for Heaney the way off-center and out-of-the way places could be their own literary and cultural fields of force. Moreover, Hughes’s rejection of the university as a teacher enabled him to speak “within the terms of his own world,” and staying a “free-lance writer from his student days[,] . . . he always retained that sense of being at the edge.”37

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME