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Seamus (Justin) Heaney (1939-2013) |
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Irish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. According to Seamus Heaney, poetry balances the "scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium." From the early collections, Heaney combined in his work personal memories with images of Irish heritage and the landscape of Northern Ireland. There is also references to English-Irish and Catholic-Protestant conflict. However, Heaney's view was much more visionary and allegorical than bound to contemporary issues. "Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art." (from Nobel Lecture, 1995) Seamus Heaney was born near Castledawson, County Derry, and
grew up on his father's cattle farm. He was the eldest in a Catholic
family of nine children. Heaney attended St. Columb's College, Derry,
and moved in 1957 to Belfast to continue his studies. In 1961 Heaney
graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, and was then trained as
teacher at St. Joseph's College of Education. After one year as a
secondary school teacher, Heaney returned to St. Josephs, where he was
a lecturer for three years. In 1966 he became a lecturer at Queen
University. Much of Heaney's early work informed the everyday life of his childhood, from digging potatoes to cutting turf. His first book, Eleven Poems, came out in 1965. At the age of 27 he won in 1966 the Eric Gregory Award with Death of a Naturalist. With these works Heaney established his reputation as a poet. In 1969, Heaney was in Belfast at the outbreakof what has become known as 'The Troubles'. In 1965 Heaney married Marie Devlin, a teacher. When they met in 1962, Heaney lent her a copy of A. Alvarez's anthology, The New Poetry. ". . . there was a muse energy in the air all right," he later said in an interview. "Marie
and I were very much the typical young marrieds of that period, with
our teak furniture and our second-hand Volkswagen. . . . " (Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll, 2010) Heaney's second book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), published by Faber, was dedicated to Marie. Serious disturbances from Protestant political dominance arouse in 1968-69. In employment and housing there were discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority. Catholic students arranged civil rights marches, that had much similarities with protest movements in elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. British troops were sent to restore peace in Belfast and Londonderry. Heaney left Belfats at the height of this conflict. Although
Heaney was not an enrolled member of the Civil Rights movement, he knew
and met several of its prominent members, including Dr Conn McCluskey,
Mrs. Patricia McCluskey, and Austin Currie. In 1972 Heaney gave up his
work at Queen's and moved with his family to County Wicklow. From
1976 he lived in Sandymouth, in Dublin. Until 1981, Heaney taught at Carysfort College
of Education. After spending frequent periods as
a guest professor at American universities, Heaney was appointed visiting
professor at Harvard. Since 1985, he served there as Boylston
Professor of Rhetoric and
Oratory. Between the years 1989 and 1994 he held Professorship of
Poetry at Oxford. Heaney was expected to deliver three public lectures
each year; ten of the fifteen he gave were he collected in The Redress of Poetry
(1995). In 1997 he was appointed Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in
Residence at Harvard. Always very aware of his role as an outsider,
Heaney was reluctant to make critical comments on the American life and
culture: "A visitor, / Part tourist and part faculty, / An ethnic
curiosity." ('Anniversary Address' for Adams House at Harvard, Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay, 2004) I can see her drowned
After North (1975),
in which Heaney addressed the ongoing civil strife,
he was considered the finest Irish poet since W.B.
Yeats, and with Ted Hughes
one of the leading poetic voices in the English-speaking world. Heaney's works are rooted in Northern Irish rural life, and draw on myth and unique aspects of the Irish experience. Reflections on his childhood gave way to darker views on his homeland. The Government of the Tongue (1988) questioned the role of poetry in modern society. The central symbol in is the bog, the wide unfenced county, that reaches back millions of years. It is the starting point for the exploraton of the past. In several works Heaney talked about the "bog people," bodies preserved in the soil of Denmark and Ireland, as in 'Punishment' in North. It depicts a tribal revenge of adultery, and sinks into powerlessness in front of ancient, violent forces: "I who have stood dumb / when your betraying sisters, / cauled in tar, / wept by the railings, / who would connive / in civilized outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge". The political situation in Northern Ireland that divided the country was dealt in Field Work
(1979) from
the standpoint of Heaney's Catholic background. Heaney was
consistent in his refusal to reduce complex political and social
issues to simple slogans. When the editors of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry included him in their collection, he made explicit his desire
not to
be called a "British" poet: "Be advised! My passport's green. / No
glass of ours was ever raised! To toast The Queen". Heaney explained in his lecture 'Frontiers of Writing' (1995) that he wrote about the color of the
passport "to maintain the right to diversity within the border" and suggested that the majority in Northern Ireland should make an effort in two-mindeness. Strong individualistic, meditative mood, marks Heaney's later
works, including Station Island
(1984), The Haw Lantern
(1987), and Seeing Things
(1991). The Haw Lantern contains poems in memory of Heaney's
mother, who died in 1984. In Electric
Light (2001) Heaney's childhood memories combine the sense of
fleeting time and death: "The room I came from and the rest of us all
came from / Stays pure reality where I stand alone, / Standing the
passage of time, and she's asleep / In sheets put on for the doctor,
wedding presents / That showed up again and again, bridal / And usual
and useful at births and deaths." Heaney's poems had often an allegorical dimension. Like Derek Walcott, and a numer of other diverse contemporary writers, he drew on the Divine Comedy of Dante. Heaney's interest in Dante dates from the 1970s; his poetry, in the context of Ireland's tragedy, has been referred as a "poetry from hell." Heaney once said that his reading of Dante "coincided with a desire to come to the whole subject of Northern Ireland by some other route." In his Nobel lecture in 1995 Heaney defended poetry "as the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics. Heaney's work as translator include Sweeney Astray (1983), from the
mediaeval Irish poem about an Irish king, who went mad during a battle
and was turned into a bird; The Cure
at Troy (1991), Heaney's rendering into English of Sophocles' Philoctetes, which took up the theme of the cure of poetry in the times of crisis,
and the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf
(1999), which was composed towards the end of the first millennium. This
translation won the Whitebread Award as the best book of 1999. In 2003
Heaney won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of
Newton Arvin. The award is the largest annual cash prize for literary
criticism in the English language. Heaney's 11th collection, District and Circle
(2006), won the
TS Eliot prize. In 2009 he received the David Cohen prize which is
awarded biennially for a lifetime's excellence in literature. Seamus
Heaney died at the age of 74 on 30 August, 2013, in Dublin. "You have won renown: you are known to all men Beowulf records the great deed of the heroic warrior Beowulf in his youth and maturity. The hero kills three monsters: a maneater called Grendel, Grendel's mother in her underwater dwelling, and 50 years later a fire-breathing dragon, which is stirred by the theft of a goblet. It mortally wounds Beowulf before expiring. The poem ends with Beowulf's funeral pyre. Central theme is the workings of fate (wyrd) in human lives. It is generally accepted that originally Beowulfwas the achievemet of a single poet, who recounted legends that were passed down orally from several centuries earlier. Heaney makes the hero's tragic stature prophetic: when he dies his people wait of the disaster that will descend on them. Also the Finnish national epic Kalevala ends in resignation with the decline of paganism, when Väinämöinen, the central character, departs the "Land of Heroes." For further reading: Seamus Heaney's American Odyssey by Edward J. O'Shea (2023); Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry by Ian Hickey (2021); On Seamus Heaney by R.F. Foster (2020); Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland by Kieran Quinlan (2020); Seamus Heaney and Society by Rosie Lavan (2020) "The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances": The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O'Brien (2016); Seamus Heaney's Regions by Richard Rankin Russell (2014); Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll (2010); Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity by Floyd Collins (2003); Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind by Eugene O'Brien (2003); Seamus Heaney: In Conversation with Karl Miller by Karl Miller and Seamus Heaney (2002); The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante by Maria Cristina Fumagalli (2001); Passage to the Center by Daniel Tobin (1999); Seamus Heaney by Helen Hennessy Vendler (1998); Passage to the Center by Daniel Tobin (1998); Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney, edited by Robert F. Garratt (1995); The Art of Seamus Heaney, edited by T. Curtis (1994); Seamus Heaney: Poet and Critic by Arthur E. McGuinness (1994); Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide by Rand Brandes and Michael J. Durkan (1994); Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet by Michael Parker (1993); Seamus Heaney, edited by H. Bloom (1993) - Suom. Jyrki Vainonen on valikoinut ja suomentanut Seamus Heaneylta runoja kokoelmiin Ojanpiennarten kuningas (1995), Ukkosvaloa (1997) ja Soran ääniä (2007). Selected works:
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