“He is a rare thing in the literary world—a bestselling poet, and superb craftsman, a charismatic performer, an intelligent scholar, and an exemplary person. . . . Heaney has forged a body of work that deserves both the popular and critical acclaim that it has received.”
Thus says Henry Hart in the summer 2006 issue of the Sewanee Review, preemptively summing up the life and career of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney who died recently following a short illness.
Seamus Heaney published two poems, “In Memoriam: Sean O’Riada” and “The Badgers,” in the spring 1976 issue of the Sewanee Review, the first of three Sewanee Review issues on the literature of Ireland. “The Badgers” later appeared in his collection “Field Work,” alongside his famous poem “Casualty.”
Though this was his only appearance in the Sewanee Review, his work and influence is discussed frequently by critics in the pages of the magazine. In a critical piece analyzing the celebrity of “Famous Seamus,” Jonathan Allison describes Heaney as a “tightrope walker, treading a fine line between political commitment and detachment, between Irish and British traditions. . . . He recognizes a complexity which makes him avoid simplistic partisanship, and this is one of the things we look for in a poet.” David Mason recounts, “what attracted me to the poems was a whole verbal texture that seemed excitingly unfamiliar, and the whiff of something dangerously significant in their political subjects. Here was a poet for the public.”
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| photo of Heaney in 1980, via |
“Digging”
was included in Seamus Heaney’s debut volume of poetry, “The Death of a
Naturalist”—a smash hit, if such a thing exists in poetry. He went on
to publish thirteen volumes of poetry, including “Stations” (1975),
“North” (1975), “Field Work” (1979), “Station Island” (1984), and
“District and Circle” (2006), along with various prose collections and
translations. With his 1999 translation of “Beowulf,” Heaney became one
of a handful of poets to grace the New York Time’s best sellers list.
As Henry Hart notes, Heaney was one of those rare writers who became
canonically significant in the span of their life. Fellow Sewanee Review contributor Robert Lowell called him, “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.” His
standing in the world of letters was affirmed repeatedly with his
collection of some of the most prestigious awards in literature. In 1995
he became the fourth Irishman—following W. B. Yeats, George Benard
Shaw, and Samuel Beckett—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hart
notes that despite his accolades Heaney’s eye never strayed far from the
task of writing: “Heaney tried to downplay the [Nobel Prize’s]
significance. He routinely refers to the Nobel Prize as ‘the Stockholm
thing’ and ‘the N-word’ and continues to write in the monastic solitude
of his attic in Dublin.” You can read the lecture Heaney delivered upon
receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 at the Nobel Foundation, as well as his conversation with the Paris Review for their the Art of Poetry series.
A host of publications and individual voices remember Heaney, that colossal figure of poetic verve and humanitarian impact.
A number of personal accounts stand out in the flow of writing,
including a eulogy delivered by Paul Muldoon at Heaney’s funeral,
published by the New Yorker (along with two other memorials), and novelist and friend Andrew O’Hagan’s account of his relationship with Heaney for the Guardian. The editors at the Guardian have also compiled reactions from a sundry of figures.
His last words, sent to his wife via text message, were in Latin: noli timere, do
not be afraid. Like his poetry, the phrase is personal and universal,
immediate and lasting. We would like to conclude with these words, again
from Henry Hart: “If his early poems were like trees rooted deep
in Irish history and soil, he wanted his new poems to be inverted trees
with their roots in heaven.”
