Seamus Heaney’s Regions

Richard Rankin Russell

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780268040369, 9780268206826
• eBook ISBN: 9780268091811
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish "Troubles" beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and map—the spirit region, that world beyond our ken.

In Seamus Heaney's Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that 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 entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaney's body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. As Russell shows, Heaney believed in the power of ideas—and the texts representing them—to begin resolving historical divisions. For Russell, Heaney's regionalist poetry contains a "Hegelian synthesis" view of history that imagines potential resolutions to the conflicts that have plagued Ireland and Northern Ireland for centuries. Drawing on extensive archival and primary material by the poet, Seamus Heaney's Regions examines Heaney's work from before his first published poetry volume, Death of a Naturalist in 1966, to his most recent volume, the elegiac Human Chain in 2010, to provide the most comprehensive treatment of the poet's work to date.

Notes

Introduction

The first epigraph, from Heaney’s “Regional Forecast,” is taken from p. 13; the second, from Heaney’s “Place and Displacement,” is taken from p. 4.

1. Heaney, “Gallery at the Abbey,” n.p. The poem Keats was referring to specifically was his “Endymion” (Letters, 170).

2. Deane, “Artist and the Troubles,” 47.

3. Heaney, Place and Displacement, 4.

4. Quoted in O’Driscoll, “Foreign Relations,” 84.

5. Ibid.

6. Heaney, “Place, Pastness, Poems,” 46.

7. Ibid., 46–47, 47.

8. Heaney, “Unhappy and at Home,” 71.

9. Heaney, Room to Rhyme, 25.

10. S. Stewart, Poetry, 149.

11. E. Longley, “Edward Thomas,” 32.

12. Frost, Selected Letters, 228; Heaney, “Threshold and Floor,” 265. He does admit, however, that Frost influenced “a couple of monologues in women’s voices in Door into the Dark” (266).

13. Heaney, “Conversation,” 45.

14. Buttel, Seamus Heaney, 29.

15. Ross, “‘Upward Waft,’” 97.

16. Heaney, One on a Side, 5.

17. Ibid., 10–11.

18. Heaney, “Threshold and Floor,” 266.

19. Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” 44.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 45.

23. Heaney, “Fire i’ the Flint,” 85.

24. Ibid., 86, 87.

25. Heaney, “Art of Poetry,” 123.

26. For a fuller discussion of Hopkins’s influence on Heaney, see Russell, “Keats and Hopkins Dialectic.”

27. Heaney, “Place, Pastness, Poems,” 45.

28. Heaney, “Art of Poetry,” 127.

29. Heaney, “Unhappy and at Home,” 71.

30. Russell, Poetry and Peace, 253.

31. Murray, “Beall Poetry Festival.”

32. See Kavanagh, “Parish and Universe,” and for discussions of Kavanagh’s positive reclamation of “parochialism”—and Heaney’s approval of this term—see Russell, Poetry and Peace, 16–17, 48–49. The quote on Hughes is from Heaney, “Art of Poetry,” 124.

33. Heaney, “Healing Fountain,” 11.

34. Heaney, “Art of Poetry,” 92.

35. Heaney, “Meeting Seamus Heaney,” 73–74.

36. Heaney, “Englands of the Mind,” 153, 154.

37. Heaney, “Conversation,” 45.

38. Heaney, “Funeral Eulogy,” n.p.

39. Ibid.

40. Hart, “Seamus Heaney,” 81, 82.

41. Heaney, “Art of Poetry,” 104.

42. Quoted in Keith, Regions of the Imagination, 4.

43. The important part of Massingham’s quotation is as follows: “A specific quality manifests itself in the complete presentation of a region, in precisely the same way as it does in a work of art. A region thus presented is a work of art” (quoted in ibid., 5).

44. Paulin, Minotaur, 4.

45. Ibid., 1, 3.

46. See Burris, Poetry of Resistance, for a powerful reading of this poem through the lens of the pastoral: “The Irish maid backed against the tree, [sic] indicates that her spoiled innocence is a fait accompli, that pastoral dreams, hopeful though they may be, arise from a plundered world” (77). For the fullest and most historically grounded reading of this poem, see Moloney’s chapter “Heaney’s Love to Ireland” in her Seamus Heaney, 72–88.

47. See Hall’s analysis of the three versions of this poem, Seamus Heaney’s Rhythmic Contract, 98–103. He observes that the earliest form of the poem, composed in late 1972/early 1973, focused “not on British aggression but on an attempt to understand the [female] other” (99). As the violence on the ground in Northern Ireland accelerated and as Heaney settled into life in the Republic and gained some much-needed geographic distance from the North, he may have felt led to charge the poem with the explicitly colonizer/colonized context that drives the final version.

48. For instance, in his preface to The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry he points out, again employing sexual intercourse resulting in pregnancy as the driving metaphor for Irish and English relations, that Paul Muldoon translates Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem “‘Ceist na Teangan’ not as ‘The Language Question’ but as ‘The Language Issue,’ since ‘issue’ implies offspring from an ongoing intercourse between Irish and English rather than a barren stand-off” (xliv).

49. Heaney, “Poets on Poetry,” 629.

50. See Russell, Poetry and Peace, 201–13, for this reading of Wintering Out.

51. Matthews, “Poet as Anthologist,” 542.

52. Russell, Poetry and Peac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. The Development of Northern Irish Regionalism
• Two. Recording Bigotry and Imagining a New Province: Heaney and BBC Northern Ireland Radio, 1968–73
• Three. Heaney’s Essays on Regional Writers: The 1970s
• Four. Wounds and Fire: Northern Ireland in Heaney’s 1970s Poetry
• Five. Darkness Visible: Irish Catholicism, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the Blackness of “Strange Fruit”
• Six. Border Crossings: Heaney’s Prose Poems in Stations
• Seven. Joyce, Burns, and Holub: Heaney’s Independent Regionalism in An Open Letter
• Eight. Affirming and Transcending Regionalism: Joyce, Dante, Eliot, and the Tercet Form in Station Island and The Haw Lantern
• Nine. The Northern Irish Context and Owen and Yeats Intertexts in The Cure at Troy
• Ten. Guttural and Global: Heaney’s Regionalism after 1990
• Eleven. “My Ship of Genius Now Shakes Out Her Sail”: The Spirit Region and the Tercet in Seeing Things and Human Chain
• Afterword. Visiting the Dead and Welcoming Newborns: Human Chain and Heaney’s Three Regions
• Notes
• Bibliography