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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— October – November 2013
T
WENTY-five years ago, Italians
were aware of just three famous
Irishmen: James Joyce, Bobby Sands
and Liam Brady. In the intervening
years, these names remained
constant, and some others were
added: Bono, Sinéad O’Connor
and, since when he won
the Nobel Prize, Séamus Heaney.
For Italians, the pronunciation
of Séamus and Sinéad is compli-
cated by the inexplicable Irish
shh sound at the start. “Bono”
poses no such challenge.
So, even here in Italy, where
few have passable English and
fewer still read willingly, Séamus
Heaney was known. Every time
he set foot outside the country,
which was often, he travelled as
a representative not just of Irish
culture but of the idea that the
Irish were cultured. A country
that could be represented by a
poet was by extension a poetic
country.
The stories of Séamus’ kind-
ness, his unpretentious manner
and willingness to give time to
the least of his fans are legion. He
was, indeed, a gentle and gener-
ous man, and perhaps the best
ambassador we could hope for. But he was
not an unassuming man.
Heaney was very cognisant of his own
representative weight. He consciously
assumed the mantel of Ireland’s leading poet
and cultural legate. Who he took it from is
a moot point – perhaps Thomas Moore,
perhaps WB Yeats. (The post, if it exists,
may skip a generation or two).
Heaney may not have put on airs,
but he travelled and operated as
an internationally-recognised
poet. When he displayed humil-
ity and grace, as he so often did,
it felt like he was rehabilitating
the role of the public poet from
some of the arrogant scoundrels
of the past.
I met him here in Rome
shortly before his death. It was a
moving experience for me to meet
a man whom I had not seen in a
long time, but was a central fig-
ure in my childhood. As a family,
we would visit him in his cottage
in Glanmore in Wicklow. It was a
place of isolation, peace, silence
and immersion in nature but
what I remember, even more viv-
idly, is the bitter cold and damp
of the place. I remember the lack
of toys, and the absence of lux-
uries and playthings in general.
It was the home of a serious man,
dedicated to the almost hopeless
task of making it through poetry
alone. It was clear to me then that Séamus
was willing to pay a high price in hardship for
the sake of his craft. He deserved his success
if only for those small smoky fires that did
little to dispel the chill of the Wicklow hills
that surrounded him. But when he registered
his sons in the local primary school, his pro-
fession was written down, in Irish, as file. He
knew what he was. He was not unassuming.
Some of the stories about Séamus have
him signing a book, encouraging a writer,
or writing a poem for a couple in a restau-
rant. These are the actions of a professional
and a celebrity. People like to remember
how he often seemed like a fish out of water,
standing there with his shy lopsided smile
amongst the diplomats, politicians, rich and
the famous. But this was the water he swam
in: this was his milieu. He was the man who
had written himself into a poet, and now,
as a poet, he liked to stand there reminding
people that he was but a man.
Heaney was aware of the contrast
between his rock-star schedule of confer-
ences and visits, planes, VIPs and hotels and
his down-to-earth, earthy self. His public
persona, however, was not at odds with the
young man in an isolated cottage writing
himself into literary history. He dug deep
into his own private memories, but the point
of all that digging was to create something
of beauty for public consumption. This may
be true of all artists, but Heaney was both
better than most artists, and more public
than many.
Heaney’s early poetry in particular
makes constant reference to his roots, the
soil, the depths of history. His declaration of
intent is set out in ‘Digging’, the first poem in
his first collection, ‘Death of a Naturalist’.
He
deserved
his success
if only for
those small
smoky res
that did
little to
dispel the
chill of the
Wicklow
hills that
surrounded
him
“
CULTURE sÉamus heaney
Séamus Heaney,
the public man
Frugal and gentle but political and not
unassuming, he conquered all. By Conor Deane
caption
simply, the most famous poet of the English
language. Now it was the canon of English
poetry that was contained within Heaney,
rather than vice versa.
Heaney became our all-conquering
hero, taking over Northern Ireland, Ireland,
England, America and even moving into
Europe via Dante, Rilke, Mandelstam,
Pascoli et al. He made his name synonymous
with poet – rather than “Irish poet” – just at
the time Ireland thought it was becoming an
all-conquering international practitioner of
finance and post-industrial production. Both
Ireland and its main cultural
exports, with Heaney leading
the way, had gone global.
Well, Ireland crashed and
its new destiny turned out to
be a chimera. Heaney, however,
mostly remembered to root his
international destiny in caul-
dron bog and holy ground of
home, though I sometimes
wonder if Heaney the jet-trav-
elling ambassador should have
listened more to what Heaney
the poet used to say about the
importance of staying on the
ground.
Living abroad, I was never
caught up in Ireland’s derac-
inated and airy ambitions
for itself and, frankly, I have
enjoyed some aspects of the
subsequent collapse. Heaney
himself was well aware of the
dangers of losing touch with
the land that nurtured him.
Now that he has left the global
stage and come home, per-
haps we can tune out some of
the radio noise that surrounds his gigantic
fame.
The giant Antaeus was unbeatable as long
as he remained attached to his mother, the
Earth. Hercules defeated him by the simple
expedient of lifting him:
Let each new hero come
Seeking the golden apples and Atlas:
He must wrestle with me before he pass
Into that realm of fame.
Among sky-born and royal.
He may well throw me and renew my
birth
But let him not plan, lifting me off the
earth,
My elevation, my fall.
(“Antaeus”)
Conor Deane is a writer living in Rome. As
Conor Fitzgerald he is the author of the Alec
Blume novels.
Between my finger and thumb
The squat pens rests.
I’ll dig with it
And dig he did, turning over turf and delv-
ing into bogs through the next books (‘Door
into the Dark’, ‘Wintering Out’, ‘North’). By
‘Field Work’ and ‘Station Island’, he was gaz-
ing with a more Wordsworthian and ‘English’
lyrical eye at the landscape rather than what
was below, and thereafter he became a lyric
poet of objects and things, shape, and tex-
ture, air and movement and water. If the first
poem in his first book was about digging, his
father, roots and the specificity of place by
the time we come to the last poem in his last
book, he was international; he was flying:
Air from another life and time and
place
Pale blue heavenly air is supporting
A white wing beating high against the
breeze.
(‘A Kite for Aibhín’)
The temporal and stylistic gap separat-
ing the local Mossbawn boy made good from
the elder international poet-statesman is
wide and filled with much beautiful writing,
but the psychic and political gap is not. From
beginning to end, Heaney had every inten-
tion of becoming not just a poet, but the poet
of his time. The poem ‘Digging’ is remark-
able for its confidence. It is a declaration of
intent – almost a declaration of war (“The
squat pens rests; snug as a gun”).
Heaney set about conquering the poetic
modes of the great poets who had formed him
– Hopkins to begin with, but also Wordsworth
and Keats, readapting elements of their style
to his own idiom, which was unmistakeably
Irish, and Northern Irish at that. Heaney also
had an expansionist streak in him. He soon
took over the Northern Irish poets, becom-
ing, for many, the voice of the Troubles – or
the non-voice, or the voice of doubt and guilt
for his failure to allow the bloody tribal poli-
tics of the North to impinge upon his lyricism
or determine the direction of his poetry. To
be a political poet was too limiting.
Yet if we pause for a moment to con-
sider the dilemma of whether to speak for
his Catholic ‘tribe’ or not, it
becomes clear that only some-
one who already believes that
he represents the tribe, or one
who believes he is, in some
sense, the voice of his people,
could feel himself in a quan-
dary. Only someone who knew
he was being read and listened
to would have made a public
and poetic display of his doubt
and guilt over how to respond
politically. Mild-mannered he
may have been, but he knew his
voice counted, that his voice
was becoming our voice. He
spoke for us.
Putting Ireland on the
literary map in the English
language has always been
a fraught issue, and differ-
ent Irish writers have had
their own solutions. Heaney
engaged in a form of reverse
imperialism. He collaborated
with Ted Hughes, a friend of
the royal family and an Anglo-
Saxon poet par excellence.
Heaney studied, absorbed, adopted (and sur-
passed) Ted Hughes in reach and depth and,
crucially, Anglo-Saxon style. It was an Irish
conquest of Hughes’ modern Anglo-Saxon
tone. (If this notion of conquest seems fanci-
ful, consider that Heaney was eventually to
produce a translation of the ur-Anglo-Saxon
work Beowulf, so that Englishness itself is
spoken with a noticeable Irish accent). Like
a Norman, Heaney conquered and then both
absorbed and was absorbed by the English
and American poets he admired. With great
tact and gentleness, he moved in and colo-
nised them.
Included within the canon of “Best
British Poets”, which led to a minor kerfuffle
and Heaney’s penning of the strangely awk-
ward lines be advised/My passport’s green./
No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast/
The Queen, he was soon to make the British-
Irish label an irrelevance by becoming, quite
When he
displayed
humility and
grace, as
he so often
did, it felt
like he was
rehabilitating
the role of the
public poet
from some of
the arrogant
scoundrels of
the past
“
caption
