An Admiration of Seamus Heaney
Though not a typical example of literary criticism, R.F. Foster’s On Seamus Heaney provides an insightful look at both the poet’s life and his works.
Review by John Austin Gray
The best advice I can give,” said a concert pianist, speaking to a group of aspiring musicians “is when you’re playing someone else’s composition, just try to get out of the way.” She was answering a question about how to perform a piece of classical music as though it were one’s own, and her response indicated that the question itself, in her estimation, was misguided. “You want the audience to walk away thinking, ‘Wow, isn’t Bach—or Bartok or Dvořák or whoever it is you’re playing—incredible?’” She was keenly aware that her musical career existed in the shadows of giants.
A similar sentiment lies at the heart of R.F. Foster’s On Seamus Heaney, the most recent contribution to Princeton University Press’ “Writers on Writers” series. Foster, one of Ireland’s most prominent historians, approaches his subject with utmost reverence, the end result being a kind of ode. Indeed, a reader who picks up the book expecting a rigorous work of literary criticism may be disappointed to find Foster’s tone decidedly uncritical (insofar as one defines “criticism” as necessarily impartial). His intense admiration for Heaney is evident on every page, and one gets the sense that his ultimate goal in writing was to get provide a pedestal on which the poet’s work might shine. Fulfilling such an objective is deceptively complex, as Foster admits in his introduction: “It is difficult to write about someone who wrote so well about himself.”
Readers unfamiliar with Heaney—or with the long history of sectarian “Troubles” in Ireland that underpins so much of his poetry—will find precious little handholding in Foster’s exposition. With Heaney being one of the most famous and influential poets of the last century, Foster knows that much of the leg-work of crafting a depiction of the artist and his social landscape from scratch has already been done for him, and although his overview is fairly comprehensive, he thankfully chooses to spend relatively little time on the information one is bound to hear in any humdrum crash course on Heaney. Readers who simply want to read Heaney’s “hits” can buy a collection; those wishing to hear the poet contextualize his own work can listen to his lectures or perhaps read Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones, the definitive collection of Heaney interviews. Foster’s endeavor is a more specialized one, namely, that of providing readers already familiar with and appreciative of Heaney’s oeuvre with a more complex, nuanced view of the man both in-the-flesh and on-the-page.
Foster’s primary task is examining the interplay between Ireland’s cultural identity and Heaney’s personal one.
Foster strikes a delicate balance between what one might call traditional narrative biography and literary criticism. In both spheres, his knowledge of Heaney is nothing short of encyclopedic. As a critic, he displays a profound familiarity not only with Heaney’s published works but also with multiple drafts of particular poems, the poet’s journals, and a number of uncollected poems (some too obscure to appear in Foster’s own index). As a biographer, Foster relates dates, topics, locations, and public receptions of countless lectures; the street addresses of every residence Heaney ever called home; and even the vocations and favored haunts of the poet’s Belfast drinking-buddies. With such a depth and breadth of knowledge, it is telling what details Foster includes and which he chooses to omit.
Noticeably absent are any substantive details of Heaney’s home life as an adult. In the handful of moments where Heaney’s family makes an appearance, Foster relates only that Heaney’s wife was beautiful, intelligent, and talented; that the two married in 1965 and had three children; and that together they all shared “a radiantly happy family life.” Foster’s brevity on the subject reflects his deference to the poet and his privacy, but the decision also reinforces Foster’s portrayal of Heaney as some kind of mythic, larger-than-life figure—a modern, literary equivalent to St. Patrick. To depict “Seamus” sitting around breakfast table with his children or drinking whiskey at his desk or quarrelling with his wife would presume too much intimacy.
Characterization of Heaney as a fabled hero is actually present in the poet’s own work, though his own depiction is far less rose-tinted than Foster’s. In early poems, Heaney used the Irish folk-figure Mad Sweeney as a kind of alter ego, a warped mirror in which he might more clearly see his own place in Irish history. Sweeney, a cursed medieval king, was transformed into a bird and made to roam around the British Isles for seven years before returning home to die. Sweeney’s kingdom included what would become the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland, where Heaney was born and spent his formative years. Heaney viewed his own departure from Ulster and his rise to prominence on the world-wide stage as a kind of mad wandering, but he ultimately fared far better, assuming what Foster calls “a position of overpowering but benign authority . . . in Irish cultural life.”
Foster’s primary task is examining the interplay between Ireland’s cultural identity and Heaney’s personal one. Foster particularly addresses Heaney’s inescapable association with W.B. Yeats, the other paragon of Irish literature, who passed away only a few months before Heaney’s birth in 1939. Yeats, a senator of the Irish Free State for several years, likely had an easier time assuming the role of Ireland’s emblematic poet, but Foster persuasively argues that Heaney was eventually able to take on Yeats’s mantle by addressing Ireland’s political turmoil with a certain degree of objectivity—a “watchful independence”—that set Heaney above the fray, granting him immunity to detractors and critics, most of whom, Foster points out, “tended to auto-destruct.”
In his presentation of most of Heaney’s poems, Foster mimics his muse’s modesty by choosing to provide only essential context and focus on only one or two key elements in any given poem.
Some readers may find it hard to identify or empathize with this unreproachable version of Heaney, but Foster manages to ease this difficulty with several humanizing moments, most of which derive their power not from Foster’s exposition but from Heaney’s own words. Foster-the-critic shows remarkable tact and restraint in providing a minimal amount of context before presenting Heaney’s poems in a way that lets them prove their own merit. Perhaps the best example of this comes from Foster’s exposition of “Mid-Term Break,” an early poem about Heaney’s returning home from boarding school following the death of his younger brother. Foster foregoes gilding the lily, simply stating that Heaney was ten years old at the time his brother suffered a fatal road accident; he is selective in the lines he includes, offering a brief summary of the poem’s early tercets before quoting the final stanzas in full:
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
The final line is heart-wrenching, made all the more so, as Foster suggests “for being restrained and unshowy.” In his presentation of most of Heaney’s poems, Foster mimics his muse’s modesty by choosing to provide only essential context and focus on only one or two key elements in any given poem.
By loading the gun and then having Heaney pull the trigger, Foster is able to humanize the poet while still maintaining his attitude as a humble odist, seeking only to provide the best lighting for the showcase of his subject’s beauty. This approach makes for a punchy critique and also allows the book to be comprehensive without being exhaustively long; despite Foster identifying over one hundred fifty noteworthy poems, the volume barely tops two hundred pages. While On Seamus Heaney isn’t exactly a personally guided tour through Heaney’s entire body of work, it provides an excellent roadmap for readers who wish to make the trip and, more importantly, makes such a trip seem wholly worthwhile.
John Austin Gray is a writer and musician who lives in Nashville, TN.
On Seamus Heaney is part of Princeton University Press’s Writers on Writers Series. It was published on August 25, 2020. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
