A Poet of the Soil

The Letters of Seamus Heaney selected and edited by Christopher Reid; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 848 pp., $45

One St. Patrick’s Day in the early 1980s, I met Seamus Heaney for lunch at the Faculty Club at Harvard, where we were both teaching. The Boston area is one of the most proudly Irish places in America, and everybody was wearing green for the day. Everybody except Seamus Heaney, that is. Heaney was Irish to the core, but he had no patience for superficial symbolism. The challenge he faced was how to represent the essence of Irish culture to the world while brushing off the green-beer sentimentality we get a taste of every 17th of March.

Heaney would not have chosen to be a spokesman for Ireland, but he found himself thrust into that position by his fame. His newly published letters—800 pages of them, ably edited by Christopher Reid—are a study in how he tried to define himself while repeatedly contending with external pressures and a world that wanted to define him on its own terms. “You don’t have to make noises against the establishment if your name is Seamus,” he writes in an early letter discussing his politics, “it’s just taken for granted.” Heaney was not simply an Irish Catholic; he sprang from the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, where the literary establishment greeted his work—and the emergence of a native Catholic, republican, rural voice—with hostility.

Michael Foley, co-editor of the Honest Ulsterman magazine, characterized Heaney’s verse as “everything that poetry should not be, a rejection of the urban world for pastoral nostalgia, a cautious upholding of all the Irish pieties (especially the Holy Trinity of nation, church and family).” Heaney’s wife, Marie, affectionately kidded him for being “the laureate of the root vegetable.” And having settled in the Republic of Ireland, he faced resentment from poets there who felt too much attention was being given to this interloper and to other Northern Irish writers such as the poet Derek Mahon and the playwright Brian Friel. After Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British soldiers shot 27 unarmed civilians during demonstrations in the Bogside neighborhood of Derry, Heaney became outspoken about the Troubles. His poem “The Other Side,” published the same year as Bloody Sunday, projects amicable coexistence between an Irish farming family and a Protestant neighbor. Heaney once told me that the poem was modeled after Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.”

Self-assurance did not come naturally. When he published his first verses in the literary journal at Queen’s University, Belfast, he chose the pseudonym Incertus, Latin for “unsure of himself.” In one early letter, he jokingly calls himself a “cautious wee papist.” Yet on a deeper level, he had complete self-confidence, fortified by what he called “the Joycean/Yeatsian tradition in this country of regarding the word itself as somehow magical; turning the act of writing into an act of consecration where the bread and wine of daily life is consecrated into the host of language, the holy wafer of art.”