Patrick Crotty
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2023), 820 pages.
The steady rise in Seamus Heaney’s cultural prominence that gathered pace on the publication of North in 1975 and reached one of its summits twenty years later when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature has shown no sign of dropping away since his death. Heaney was so intimately familiar a figure – and not only in his native Ireland – that his demise on 30 August 2013 seemed untimely, albeit, at seventy-four, he had lived longer than W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and even W. B. Yeats. The customary dip in reputation after death did not take place in his case. Posterity saw the emergence of unfamiliar and to some degree unguessed at writing – the version of Aeneid VI in 2016, and then in 2022 the hefty Translations of Seamus Heaney. (The earlier of those years witnessed also the opening of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, which admitted 40,000 visitors in its first twelve months of operation.) Alongside established works such as Sweeney Astray and Beowulf, Translations presented scores of high quality lyric renderings of material from various ancient, medieval and contemporary languages. The existence of most of these pieces was a surprise even to commentators who considered themselves familiar with the shape and substance of the poet’s output. That all but one of the newly gathered translations had already been published – sometimes more than once – hinted at the scale of Heaney’s sub-canonical activity across a range of newspapers, periodicals and commemorative volumes, and whetted readerly appetites for the fugitive original verses currently being recovered by Bernard O’Donoghue for the promised Collected Poems. And now comes Letters, an 800-page annotated selection representing no more than a fraction of Heaney’s enormous surviving correspondence.
Discipline and courtesy
If there is something old-world – indeed almost Victorian – about the scale of Heaney’s epistolary output, the immediate circumstances of its composition were distinctively modern. Many of the letters were written in airport lounges and hotel foyers, on airliners or otherwise in transit. A distinction between their formally declared and actual places of composition is repeatedly drawn, either in the texts themselves or the editorial commentary. Heaney’s habit of appropriating headed notepaper from august institutions and expensive hotels and owning up to the misleading implications of the letterhead as he writes from some later point of his itinerary provides a sort of running gag through the Letters. Humour apart, though, the on-the-move nature of much of the correspondence attests to the industry and good manners that marked the career from the beginning. The poet was both extraordinarily hard-working and implacably courteous. People who attended his public readings were frequently astonished at his insistence on staying behind to autograph the books of every last member of the unfailingly long signing queue that formed as the audience broke up. (He used to joke that in futurity unsigned copies would become valuable collector’s items.) Discipline and courtesy were intertwined values for Heaney: many of the letters begin with apologies for their own lateness but their very existence testifies alike to his work ethic and his manners. He typically praises the productions (artistic, critical or editorial) of his correspondents in sufficient detail to demonstrate that he has devoted attention to them. His applause is never cursory, though it is sometimes perhaps a little dutiful; only rarely does it verge on what in Ireland we call plámás (flattery).
When plain speaking was called for, Heaney could come briskly to the point, as for instance when he told the aspirant rural poet James Crowden that his verses put themselves ‘in the service of true record rather than of lyric flight / transformation’. He was more forthright again on 12 July 1988 when he responded in alarm to the disclosure that the English critic Michael Parker’s unannounced investigations among his siblings and neighbours in County Derry were to be drawn upon for a biographically inflected study, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet:1
The people you interviewed – with a few exceptions – are not literary acquaintances but presences in the life of my first affections. The places you photographed and hope to map are actually now images that inhere as much in what I wrote as in what I remember. For this reason, the shock of intrusion, which I felt when I heard of your initial visit to my family, has been dramatically renewed with the news of the Macmillan project. For example, the Moyola sandbed. That place I marked so that you could see it. If any photograph appeared, or map that gave access, I would be devastated. It is one of the most intimate and precious of the places I know on earth, one of the few places where I am not haunted or hounded by the ‘mask’ of S. H. It would be a robbery and I would have the cruel knowledge that I had led the robber to the hidden treasure and even explicated its value.
He made clear that his objections were in part artistic, as Parker’s project ‘interferes with the way I possess my own generative ground and memories; and is therefore potentially disabling to me in what I could still write’. (In the event, critic and poet agreed a modus operandi for the study, and letters later in the volume attest to the genial character of their subsequent relations.)
Negotiating privacy and fame
Heaney’s consternation in 1988 may be understandable but it highlights quandaries with regard to the conflicting demands of privacy and fame that are difficult to resolve. Indeed the very volume that so eloquently attests to the poet’s ‘shock, rage and self-rebuke’ (his own words near the end of the quoted letter) at intrusions into his personal space may itself strike readers as unduly defensive with regard to that space now that its occupant has passed into history. Few will quibble with the request of Heaney’s widow and children that the confidentiality of communications between members of the immediate household should remain, in the editor’s word, ‘inviolable’. But what of the wider family? We know from various references in the work that as a teenager and young man the poet wrote letters home. ‘Yet when I appealed to Heaney’s surviving siblings they were unable to show me any’, observes Reid, in a phrase one is tempted to call pointedly diplomatic. The poet’s career was from the beginning characterised by a dialectic between openness, on the one hand, and what might be termed reputation management, on the other. Few writers have put themselves so generously at the disposal of their readers, as those many hours of book-signing attest. Yet there has been a measure of occlusion also. Stepping Stones presented a series of frequently fascinating reflections on the connections between the life and the art, but such revelations as the volume contained were made very much at the poet’s discretion, in the course of curated, deeply deliberated responses to questions by Dennis O’Driscoll that had in their turn been submitted in written form.2
For all of Heaney’s Wordsworthian qualities, we are very far from the spontaneous overflow of feelings, powerful or otherwise, in Stepping Stones. The book, ultimately an orchestrated collection of interviews, was intended not merely to obviate the necessity for formal autobiography but also (as Heaney admitted to Michael Longley on 10 July 2011) to forestall biography.
There may of course be an entirely innocent explanation for the absence of the poet’s epistolary juvenilia from Letters, and the matter may have more to do with the pragmatic, unsentimental values of the community from which he sprang than with issues of reputation management. The early correspondence, that is to say, may simply have been thrown out in the interests of good housekeeping by folk who had no inkling that the charming firstborn of Patrick and Margaret Heaney was on his way to global fame. What is significant where the volume under review is concerned, at any rate, is the fact of, rather than the reason for, the lack of youthful correspondence. By the time he wrote the first of the letters preserved here – to Seamus Deane on 9 December 1964 – he was already well on the way to becoming ‘Seamus Heaney’. He was twenty-five years old, and the approach from Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber that would lead to the publication of Death of a Naturalist in May 1966 was a mere five weeks away. By contrast, we first encounter the epistolary selves of Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes at seventeen, of Philip Larkin at eighteen and of Robert Lowell and Hugh MacDiarmid at nineteen in the published correspondence of five celebrated senior practitioners with whom Heaney was to have first-hand interaction in the initial decade or so of his fame. The Irish poet’s case is highly unusual in that the epistolary record not only postdates the literary one but does so decisively: poems and articles by him had been appearing in Belfast periodicals from at least as early as 1959.
A talent for friendship
The recipient of that December 1964 letter had been close to Heaney since their secondary schooldays at St Columb’s in Derry. The friendship with Deane was atypical, insofar as it appears eventually to have broken down. A narrative of the two writers’ gradual estrangement can be pieced together from letters to shared acquaintances rather than from direct exchanges: the furore about the gender politics of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,3 of which Deane was general editor, and the subsequent difficulties of the Field Day Theatre Company, of which both men were directors, appear to have combined to push apart colleagues who were still on terms of warmest amity in August 1988 (see the hasty procrastinatory note reproduced on p. 298). The overall impact of the volume, though, is to exhibit a rare – even a lavish – talent for friendship. The empathy which forms so striking feature of Heaney’s verse, early and late, is sometimes associated with the values of romantic poetry (Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’, Keats’s ‘negative capability’); it appears ultimately, however, to have been a matter of psychological disposition, an openness to others that is evident on page after page here and that was instinctively picked up on by the adulatory audiences at his public readings.
That the poet was on terms of more or less intimate friendship with a large number of people cannot be doubted. There was nonetheless an inner circle that persisted for decades, albeit new members were admitted from time to time. The core group included the singer and documentary maker David (‘Davey’) Hammond, the dramatist Brian Friel, the painter Barrie Cooke, the poet Ted Hughes, the academic and novelist Thomas Flanagan, and the critic Helen Vendler. Celebrity was no pre-requisite for entry, and ‘private individuals’ such as Des Kavanagh, a Galway-based pal from his St Columb’s days, and Jane and Bernard (brother of the more famous Herbert) McCabe were among those of the first importance to Heaney. One of the remarkable things about these friendships was the way they could ignore ideational differences to thrive on a sometimes small intersection set of shared interests. Vendler was essentially a belated, if undoubtedly brilliant representative of ‘New Criticism’, a post-War American trend in literary studies that ignored questions of power and cultural value to focus on the allegedly stable internal dynamics of literary texts. Heaney’s poems were certainly of sufficient verbal intricacy and symbolic heft to facilitate New Critical readings, as Vendler’s 1998 monograph on them demonstrates, but the political and historical concerns that are front and centre of their subject matter, and that were of manifest import to their creator in his life beyond the page, meant nothing to her. Similarly with Hughes. The impact of the English poet’s example can be detected in the way Death of a Naturalist4 and Door into the Dark5 evoke the physical world, and – even more crucially – in the use of rural detail to give sudden, visionary-seeming access to the past in Wintering Out6 and North.7 The brooding, atavistic and irrationalist side of Hughes’s achievement, however, like his insistence on the shamanistic nature of the poetic calling, could scarcely have been further from Heaney’s rationalist cast of mind and his conception of the poet as a civic agent with moral responsibilities. An affecting tribute in a letter of 19 May 1999 to Hughes’s widow Carol, understandably, makes no reference to these disparities:
On the dedication page [of Beowulf] I want to put ‘in memory of Ted Hughes’, not only because he fostered me as a poet, but because he was like the minstrel who sings in Heorot Hall, ‘telling with mastery of man’s beginnings, / how the Almighty had made the earth / a gleaming plain, girdled with waters’. And so on. It belongs to him.
Relations with other poets
Heaney has been lauded for so long that it is salutary to be reminded of how he had to struggle in his early days. The correspondence reveals that he was harried by financial worries until late in the 1970s, and even that he initially felt less than wholly welcome in the Republic, his move from Belfast to Wicklow in 1972 being met with as much scepticism on the southern as on the northern side of the border. (We find him expressing relief to Longley in June 1975 that North ‘has conquered the Dublin resistance’.) The burgeoning critical and public enthusiasm for his work brought its own problems in the shape of the resentment of some of his fellow-poets. The already southern- based John Montague, who was ten years older than Heaney and had grown up in his neighbouring county of Tyrone, behaved in an openly truculent manner in response to what he saw as the usurpation of his position as representative voice of the northern Catholic experience. To be fair to Montague, he began to come round once he encountered the poems that in due course made their way into Field Work,8 and thereafter he increasingly acknowledged the depth and originality of the younger man’s gift. Heaney and his most immediate northern contemporary, Longley, maintained cordial, mutually admiring relations until the end, a few bumps along the road notwithstanding. With the slightly younger Derek Mahon it was otherwise. Mahon’s poetry was cerebral, allusive and (a tad too self-consciously?) sophisticated, but it lacked the verbal resource and extraordinary capacity for renewal that marked Heaney’s. When the older poet wrote on 27 October 1997 to congratulate him on The Yellow Book, then as now seen something of a ‘comeback’ volume after a fallow decade, Mahon inscribed ‘Pompous ass’ under the ‘Seamus’ signature. While Heaney’s letter is far from pompous, the quotation-laden, polyglot character of its eulogy, for all its mimesis of the procedures of The Yellow Book itself, may have struck the recipient as insincere.
Poets of subsequent generations, perceiving no threat, simply admired Heaney. Their delight in his achievement was reciprocated by a precursor who – unsurprisingly – was drawn in particular towards younger writers whose work displayed a flair for stylistic ingenuity. The verses of Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Durcan in (very) different ways remind us that poetry, even if it must be and do other things also, essentially consists of arranging lineated words in unprecedented combinations. Comments from February 1976 in praise of Muldoon’s Mules, for all their brevity, are masterstrokes of insight and expressive force. Their concentrated metaphorical mode shows one of Heaney’s critical idioms, the beguilingly anti-professional language of his compliment to McGuckian in January 1991 quite another. Her poetry, he told the Belfast poet,
is so inventive, so fluid, so different, so resistant to the clomp- clomp of linear narrative, the one-two-three addy-uppy and draw- a-line kind of writing, that it is, of course, very hard to write about.
When on 16 December 2005 he received by way of Christmas greeting Durcan’s ‘A View of the Bridge’, a playful fictional vignette of Heaney with John McGahern in the west of Ireland, he reciprocated with a bravura Durcanesque flourish of his own, a thirty-three line hommage that comes close to replicating the Dubliner’s distinctive serio-comic tonalities.
Other letters cast either entirely in verse or featuring passages of epistolary poetry are included also. Revealingly, all five of these performative pieces use Standard Habbie (commonly but misleadingly known as the Burns stanza). Only one of them, the 1983 ‘Open Letter’ protesting an anthological presentation of Heaney’s poems under the banner of ‘British Poetry’, has been previously published, and it is by some distance the weakest, as awkward (as the editor notes) in its manner as its versification. By contrast ‘The Stirling Stanzas’ appended to a July 1990 letter to his friends Alasdair and Elise Macrae bring an assured swagger to their comic celebration of the English Studies department at the University of Stirling, where Alasdair worked and where Heaney had been conferred with an honorary degree the previous month. ‘Epistle to Rab Wilson’ comprises a witty April 2011 apology declining an invitation, itself issued not only in Standard Habbie but in Scots, to inaugurate a series of poetry readings at the Burns Museum in Alloway. In between come two verse letters of startling quality, an untitled one to Sorley MacLean dated 3 September 1991, and ‘Epistle to Robert Crawford’, a 31-stanza tour-de-force from March 1996 addressed to the St Andrews academic, poet, and biographer. The verses to Crawford turn back upon themselves to scrutinise the limitations as well as the power of Standard Habbie, and to communicate the sender’s unease at being attracted to a literary form that can be identified as easily with the authoritarian as with the libertarian tendencies of Scottish (and Ulster) Presbyterianism. The poem to MacLean, too, is self-aware in its straddling of cultural and linguistic faultlines, deploying as it does a Scots (Teutonic, Lowland) stanza to salute the Gaelic (Celtic, Highland) art of one of the twentieth century’s great poets, an art mediated to its Irish admirer primarily through the medium of his salute, English:
I heard you, Sorley, and expanded,
My ear and being were commanded.
It was as if the Prince had landed And won the day.
I did and did not understand it:
Poetry!
Poetry by its pitch and tone,
Its crises suffered in the bone,
Its tragic magma and
ozone Survived translation,
The spirit’s cover had been blown By inspiration.
The extent of Heaney’s fascination with Scottish poets and poetry is difficult to exaggerate. He published three essays on MacDiarmid, one each on Burns, Edwin Muir and Norman MacCaig, a volume of translations from the Older Scots of Robert Henryson, along with sundry articles and a lecture on MacLean and a superb English rendering of the latter’s spectral ballad ‘Hallaig’; he wrote one poem about MacDiarmid (‘An Invocation’), two kick-started by lines from his work (‘Keeping Going’, ‘The Turnip- Snedder’), and a joint elegy for MacCaig, MacLean, George Mackay Brown and Iain Crichton Smith (‘Would They Had Stay’d’). In the Letters he thanks Hughes for supplying in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being9 a theoretical framework that allows him to understand the decline in imaginative force from the early (mainly Scots) lyrical poems to the later
(mainly English) discursive verse of MacDiarmid, a matter about which Heaney cared deeply and Hughes cared scarcely at all. Quite why the south Derry poet was so engaged by Scottish poetry has never been satisfactorily explained. The opening stanzas of the verse letter to MacLean offer an answer unbidden when they reveal that Heaney’s earliest exposure to poetry came by way of the folk imitations of Burns (‘the first / Art-speech I heard’) that remained popular in northern counties from the late eighteenth century through to his own formative years.
Religion and public life
The volume clarifies various other issues also, even if it contains few startling revelations. Heaney was reticent about his opinions, knowing that any public airing of them could serve only to distract attention from his art and divide his audience between those who agreed and disagreed with his espousal of this or that point of view. He was aware, however, that the confidentiality afforded by private correspondence was limited by time, and that in the case of writers in whom posterity retained an interest discretion could amount to no more than a holding operation. ‘Christ, now that Larkin’s letters are out and Longley’s are in the archives,’ he observed to Mahon on 9 October 1992, ‘I’m beginning to panic about putting down a line!’ While anyone who paid close attention to the poems could work out that Heaney’s religious position was a sort of dolorous agnosticism, the Letters indicate that his rejection of the Catholicism of his early years was lastingly painful in character; they also convey his desire to restrict discussion of the matter to his own immediate circle. In 2006 he took steps to prevent disclosure by an American journal of his refusal of Communion at his mother’s obsequies in 1984, commenting that he was ‘shy of making the funeral story more public than it is’. He refers again and again to what one letter (to the poet Tom Sleigh) calls ‘the voices of my early and earnest and admirable Catholic education’. Touchingly, in July 1996 he tells Hughes that when he attended evening Mass in the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela and witnessed there the ordination of two priests and the consecration of three deacons, ‘the whole underlife of my childhood and teens rallied and wept for itself’.
Letters makes few direct comments on current affairs, and such positions as are endorsed – support for the Good Friday Agreement, opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq – are predictable. A rare outburst of vehemence was occasioned by the landslide defeat of Liam Cosgrave’s Fine-Gael–Labour coalition in the June 1977 general election. That an administration could boast of commitment to constitutional politics while overseeing extra-judicial Garda operations and hounding the president from office for his having had the temerity to discharge one of his few constitutional functions clearly proved too much for Heaney, who responded to newspaper photographs of defeated cabinet ministers by telling Friel, ‘I got a sense of hope for the first time when I saw them all to-day on the Irish Times, nest featherers and chest beaters, chancers and bouncers’.
He reserved particular contempt for Conor Cruise O’Brien, who lost his Dáil seat along with his ministry in the governmental rout; the poet had initially welcomed the former diplomat’s entry into national politics but on the evidence of his ministerial performance in government had now come to see him as an ‘egotistical … west British’ poseur.
What Heaney will be remembered for is what he most cared about, poetry, and it is scarcely surprising that the aspect of public life that most exercises him in his correspondence is the place of poetry, and to some degree of literature more widely, in society. His career coincided with the rise of critical theory, whose advocates promised to intellectualise literary study by replacing the fuddy-duddy belle lettrism of traditional English departments with approaches of near scientific rigour, reflecting the new understanding of the relationship between word and world offered by Saussurean linguistics. Things did not go quite according to plan, and the bright snow crystals of theory quickly turned to the slush of cultural studies. The poet, in his capacity as someone actually engaged in the production of literature, was disconcerted to see swathes of criticism by younger academics take the form of reductive moralising, with one or other famous author featuring in his or her (usually his) capacity as serial offender against some solemnly venerated abstraction. The matter was one of intimate concern because of his friendship with Hughes, victim in his eyes of hate crimes on the part of militants, who considered themselves qualified to sit in judgement on the English poet’s relationship with his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Some of Heaney’s comments are offhand and relatively good-humoured, as when he mentions ‘the theory dreck … young Turks and Turkettes will be broadcasting’ at the Yeats Summer School. Others, though, are deadly serious, like his 1994 expression of dismay at ‘how utterly the academy has abandoned its responsibilities to the culture’.
The poet’s art
The correspondence offers many insights into Heaney’s own art. The excitement of the decade up to 1975, when the poetry was racing ahead not only of its own public record but even of the poet himself, is vividly conveyed. We can track his growing sense of creative capacity as the mimetic impulse displayed in the earliest poems becomes freighted with symbolic possibilities that he always somehow manages to locate means of realising in language. The greatest work nevertheless still lay well in the future during those heady years: there is something approaching critical consensus that it is to be found among the simultaneously grave and agile ruminations of Seeing Things10 and The Spirit Level.11 Such light as the book casts on the poetry is for the most part retrospective, as for instance in the 1982 comments on ‘Broagh’ to the Polish poet Piotr Sommer, or the unusually detailed 1993 explication of ‘King of the Ditchbacks’ to Audrey C. Davies (a correspondent identified only as the addressee of a letter discovered in an Orkney bookshop). An exception is provided by an account from 26 September 2000 of the composition of the then almost immediately contemporary ‘Glanmore Eclogue’. The poet tells the American translator David Ferry of the associative, one-thing-leads- to-another, circumstance-registering way the poem accrued, a description that presumably has pertinence for the creation of many other late pieces also. Readers may be surprised to find that Heaney appears to have valued the ‘literary’ (even fanciful) ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ as much as its magisterially imagined companion piece, ‘District and Circle’ (title- poem of his penultimate collection). They may similarly be intrigued by the seriousness he brought to bear upon his translations of Greek tragedy, The Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes. Along with letters discussing various Field Day productions of work by other authors, the correspondence relating to his versions of Philoctetes and Antigone attests to his keen interest in the staging and pacing of plays, an interest running well beyond the rendering of dialogue and chorus into his own distinctive English.
Diversity of styles
Something must be said, before concluding, about the variety of mode and mood that enlivens The Letters. The book encompasses transcriptions not only of the handwritten or typed contents of envelopes, but also of faxes, email attachments, and – a favourite medium – post cards. If the setting of the poetry is largely Irish, that of the correspondence is global. Grim, haunted reactions to South African poverty coexist with celebrations of ‘the dense reality of gathered pastness in the gardens and shrines and tea-houses’ of Japan. Foreign haunts are sometimes presented in pseudo-Hibernian ‘translation’, as when the poet tells O’Driscoll of the guest quarters on Derek Walcott’s property in Saint Lucia: ‘He has some class of a hen-house or turf- shed on the premises where we can be on our own.’ Such comic flourishes recur, though sometimes the humour is of a more or less private kind: only those fortunate enough to have experienced at first hand the sonorous conversational style of Sorley MacLean and the gleefully jokey one of Iain Crichton Smith, for example, will appreciate the accuracy and wit of Heaney’s phrase (in the already cited letter to the Macraes) ‘the ululations of Raasay and the jocund whinnyings of Taynuilt’. The poet was a gifted mimic, albeit he chose to exercise that talent out of earshot of his public. The mischievous side of his character, though somewhat underplayed in Reid’s selection, breaks cover here and there, as when Heaney writes a letter in the guise of Robert Henryson, worried at the prospect of being translated by an Irish upstart, or sends a card to Hammond in the fictional persona of a massage parlour employee called Sadie. The overall tone of the volume is far from jocular, however. The letters typically adapt their style to the circumstances of their recipients: we find a delicately judged message of condolence to Crichton Smith’s widow Donalda, a reverential tribute to Gary Snyder, and a friendly, uncondescending sharing of school memories with the pupils of St Mary’s primary school, Bellaghy. A self-reflective alertness to language is evident throughout, and when occassion demands – as it often does in his letters to Hughes – Heaney can combine intellectual force with astonishingly resourceful eloquence. The capacity for on-the-hoof figurative invention that so lit up his conversation, though, is perhaps not as richly exercised as might have been expected.
One of the paradoxes of being Seamus Heaney was that a talent for friendship evolved, as his fame increased, into a talent for obligation. Many of the poet’s public appearances were made as favours to friends, and not a few required the preparation of lectures rather than just the reading of poems. How he managed to sustain his creative output through all the resulting labour and travel is little short of a mystery. The letters are punctuated by increasingly frequent complaints of being ‘frazzled’, reduced to a ‘mascot’ or a ‘waft of aftermath’. We hear of ‘the subtle wastage-by-exposure of one’s meaning and specific literary gravity – or rather literary specific gravity’. In the summer of 1997 Heaney appears to have come close to depression. A more lasting – and concerning – dip in spirits took place in 2010, though he was by and large restored to himself early the following year. The exacting sense of obligation alike to friends and public that is reflected in his unfailing courtesy as a correspondent took its toll upon his person, certainly, yet it served his conviction that poetic authenticity could never be achieved without travelling what Wordsworth called ‘life’s common way’. If Heaney’s heart, as the romantic poet said of Milton’s, ‘The lowliest duties on [it]self did lay’, his discharge of those duties has left us, in the volume under discussion, with an abundant and absorbingly interesting testament to a life well lived.
Patrick Crotty is Professor Emeritus of Irish and Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is an authority on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid and has written widely on modern Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American poetry. He has been a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement since 1992.
(Notes)
- Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993).
- Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).
- Seamus Deane (general ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991).
- Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966).
- Seamus Heaney, Door Into the Dark (London: Faber & Faber, 1969).
- Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber & Faber, 1972).
- Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975).
- Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979).
- Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
- Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991).
- Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London: Faber & Faber, 1996).
