SEAMUS HEANEY IN CONTEXT. Edited by Geraldine Higgins. Cambridge University Press
Now that Seamus Heaney is no longer with us to enrich our reading lives with new inspirations, along come the academic embalmers to set their seal on his poetic stature and importance.
Thirty-two of them do so, with varying degrees of success, in this earnest Cambridge volume. A goodly number, including the book’s editor, come from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which on this showing is making a bid to corner the market in Heaney studies. Lord, what would they say did their Catullus walk that way?
Many writers have responded memorably to Heaney’s verse down through the years – people like Ian Hamilton, John Carey, Clive James and A Alvarez – but you won’t find the same dazzling insights or sparkling sentences in this dutiful, and occasionally impenetrable, trudge through the poet’s output and influences.
Instead you’ll come across sentences like this: “Paradoxically enough, given that Heaney’s voice is more inclined towards the demotic than the hierophantic, more Keatsian-receptive than Nietzschean-dramatic, the example of Yeats’s voice has been bracing in several different ways”.
That’s from an essay by Margaret Mills Harper on Yeats’s importance for the Derry poet, and this is from an essay by Deepika Bahri on Heaney and post-colonialism: “Heaney’s commitment to transnationalism emerges in this repeated return to the trope of borders and frontiers in what might be read as poetic displacement of political troubles founded in their overwhelming reality”. And I couldn’t make it to the end of Laura O’Connor’s jargonistic consideration of Heaney and “the Feminine”.
There’s too much of this obfuscatory (and deadening) stuff– the price seemingly paid by so many writers of academic theses, who feel obliged to begin their essays with dogged declarations of intent such as “I want to suggest…”, “This essay considers…” and “This essay will focus on…”
It’s gratifying, then, to record some notable successes. There are five essays featured in the section on ‘Influences and Tradition’, four of them about Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot and MacNeice, but the most absorbing of them is Ron Schuchard’s consideration of Thomas Hardy, which gives the reader a real understanding of the thematic and lyrical relationship between these two poets from different eras but similar rustic backgrounds.
And in the section entitled ‘Poetics’, there’s an especially interesting essay by Brendan Corcoran, which argues that “the ‘poem of mourning and consolation’ lies at the heart of both the poetic tradition and Heaney’s own body of work”. Here I was reminded of Ian Hamilton’s 1987 review of The Haw Lantern in which Hamilton provocatively remarked that Heaney “is better at addressing the dead than he is at confiding in the living”. That may have been true about his earlier career but not of his later poetry, in which a sense of transience and mortality led him increasingly towards engagement with the personal and intimate.
But Heaney has been rightly hailed as one of poetry’s great elegists and Corcoran pays due attention to the poet’s lifetime’s devotion to this strand in his work.
Also under the “poetics” banner, Vona Groarke writes about such recurring proper nouns used by Heaney as “bucket”, “lorries”, “car”, “bicycle” and “door” and she does so engagingly, indeed quite playfully.
In ‘The Belfast Group’, Heather Clark evokes Heaney’s poetic apprenticeship, and also that of Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, under the encouraging mentorship of dynamic Queen’s University lecturer Philip Hobsbaum; and in the chapter detailing Heaney’s involvement with Field Day, Marilynn Richtarik captures the relationship between the poet and Brian Friel.
Towards the end, in a section called ‘Legacy’, Fintan O’Toole, who has been appointed the poet’s official biographer by the Heaney family, writes of the poet’s “ability to bring both gravity and warmth to any occasion” and anyone who’s ever known or even met Heaney can testify to the truth of that.
A pity, then, that this Cambridge reade is so solemn and, for much of its length, so offputting for the interested common reader. In her introduction, Geraldine Higgins claims that the book “occupies a unique moment in Heaney criticism. Appearing just over seven years since the poet’s death…it considers the contexts of Heaney’s work while his literary reputation is not finally settled”.
And thus she argues that the book she has edited “joins the critical conversation at what might be called the writer’s afterlife in print. As his work enters its posthumous phase, new projects like a collected poems, prose and letters will inevitably shape our understanding of Heaney’s place in the pantheon. The essays published here offer intersecting themes and critical concerns in the current terrain of Heaney studies while suggesting new directions for reading Heaney’s poetry in future contexts”.
I’m not sure what any of that means – except that, with the poet no longer around to have his own demurring say, the academics are now at liberty to write what they like about what his work really means. “As learned commentators view/In Homer more than Homer knew…”
