SEAMUS HEANEY: A CONFERENCE AND COMMEMORATION ABSTRACTS - 10-13 APRIL, 2014

SEAMUS HEANEY:
A CONFERENCE AND
 COMMEMORATION
   10-13 APRIL, 2014

   ABSTRACTS

Chris Allen
Trinity College Dublin – Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing –
challen@tcd.ie

Between the God in the Tree and the Tree in the Mind

There is an image of Seamus Heaney on Boa Island standing over his own reflection in a stone font. The font is
accidental, an unintended reservoir left by the carver of the famous statue as he sought to accentuate the
separateness of two faces in the confines of a single head. There is a sense in which its, (the font’s), existence is
the greater part of the genius of the whole; even the words which best describe this little rainwater vessel –
font, reservoir, mirror - seem by their symbolic natures to substantiate and credit the assertion. Using this image
as its template, this paper will outline the particular duality of inheritance and legacy in Irish poetic tradition. It
will argue that in the looking back and looking forward that poets do, (and Irish poets do it more than most),
there is a similar production, an unintended reservoir, a font of greater genius, in hand.

The metaphor created by the image comes very close to the beat of what Seamus Heaney attempted to uncover
at the heart of poetic language. The metaphor also implies a deliberate hand working outside of the poet’s
consciousness. It might seem audacious to suggest that there are fonts in language which Seamus Heaney could
have remained unaware of - but Seamus Heaney himself allowed for the ‘deep, unconscious’ in poetry, as in the
following passage from his essay, The God in the Tree;

   “Poetry of any power is always deeper than its declared meaning. The secret between the words, the
   binding element, is often a psychic force that is elusive, archaic and only half apprehended by maker and
   audience.”

Drawing on his critical work, I will review the ways in which Seamus Heaney engaged this element in language.
Focusing ultimately on his relationship to older Irish-language poetry, I will present ways in which this metaphor
can create new critical perspectives on Heaney’s poetic legacy.

I will focus on Seamus Heaney’s translations of Buile Suibhne. Heaney made two distinct translations of this
text, the first of these in 1972 and a second one seven years later in 1979. I will demonstrate that by the time
Heaney begins his second translation there has been a significant adjustment in his relationship to the original
Irish text. By the time he finishes the second translation his relationship to the whole corpus of older-Irish
language poetry has changed. This change provides a new perspective which can broaden critical
understandings of Heaney’s achievements.

In 1972 Heaney undoubtedly saw in Buile Suibhne a means to provide an ‘adequate response’ to the conflict in
Northern Ireland. I will look at the forces which drew him to the old Irish text and explore the reasons why his
first translation was never published. I will look at language itself through Heideggerian and Burkean thought
in order to establish a framework in which to assess Heaney’s relationship to the Irish language. This paper will
argue that not only does Heaney carve out for himself a ‘third space’; a site of repose in which he would find
sanctuary for the remainder of his writing life - but in removing the weight of ideological harnessing from the
Irish manuscript material, he effectively removes this material from the binary to which it was consigned by
the Irish Literary Revival. In doing this Heaney returns us- in our cultural relationship to that material - to a
point in history which pre-dates Charlotte Brookes.

I will refer to a range of Heaney’s critical prose in support of these arguments as well as using Burke, Hedigger
and Bhabha to elucidate on concepts of language. I will situate Heaney’s translations in the context of other
translations of the older Irish language poetry. I will use the text of the poem ‘Punishment’ to engage the
obvious dialogue between the subtext of the argument I make and some of the critical responses to the
volume North. I will ground the paper within the framework of the Boa island statue and the metaphoric
potential of the unintended font to reshape critical perspectives on Heaney’s poetic legacy.

Nicholas Allen
University of Georgia
na@uga.edu

Slow Erosions: Seamus Heaney, History and Water

This paper will look at the imagery of water in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. The idea is to connect his

poetry to a global history that connects the insular history of Ireland to broader trends of cultural

connection. The shattering of empires in the early twentieth century foregrounded the histories of

nations, nations that revised their origins in denial of the world systems to which they had been

attached; the consequences of these attachments, in plantation, colonization and violence have

erupted into literature with unsettling force. This is the stuff of ghosts and hauntings, two classic

markers of the Irish cultural experience. Heaney dressed these experiences in mist, dew and Atlantic

seepage. Water is a medium in his work that leaks into new forms of cultural association that are still

to settle into shape. Looking at poems from Wintering Out, North, and Station Island, this paper will

read Heaney’s water world as a fluid and sometimes-subterranean attempt to undo the solid state of

a troubled given place, ‘things found clean on their own shapes,| Water and ground in their extremity’.

Dr. Rose Atfield
Brunel University
joyrosemary@talktalk.net

“…a solid man
A pillar to himself and to his trade…” Heaney and the Father archetype.

Heaney described himself in an interview as “Jungian in religion”. His examination of self is powerfully
extended through the Father archetype which Jung suggested “appears in the form of a spirit in
dreams…comports itself like a ghost…mobilizes philosophical and religious convictions…”. Heaney
achieves a potent balance between the material and the spiritual in his reminiscences, establishing his
father in terms of the motif of the ashplant, his badge of authority, as a Jungian archetypal “Wise old
Man”. In “The Stone Verdict”(1987), in which the death of his father is projected, a tender concern for
an appropriate ‘judgement’ can be read in Jungian, archetypal terms, as the redeployment of classical
myth gives the father a god-like stature. In the volumes published subsequent to his father’s death,
the spiritual dimension is more directly recognized and celebrated. In “Man and Boy”(1991), this
experience recalls the death of his father’s father, emphasising the archetypal quality of this recurring
situation in a complex of déjà-vu and prefiguration in the time continuum.

          In response to the death of Lowell, a literary father, Heaney suggested, “When a person whom
we cherished dies, all that he stood for goes a-begging, asking us somehow to occupy the space he
filled, to assume into our own lives values which we admired in his and thereby to conserve his unique
energy.” This paper will consider something of what Heaney stood for, the values admired in his life
and will celebrate his “unique energy”, through some brief references to poems presenting the
archetypal father from each collection and a detailed reading of “The Butts” from Human Chain.

Dr Anne Baden-Daintree
University of Bristol
anne.baden-daintree@bristol.ac.uk

An Intimate Intrusion: Heaney Translating Henryson

Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid brings its readers into a voyeuristically intimate relationship
with the sufferings of Cresseid. While Henryson’s continuation of Chaucer’s narrative exhibits
both moral judgement and sensitive empathy, Heaney’s translation emphasises this latter
generosity of attitude toward Cresseid. However, just as Henryson’s readers intrude on
Cresseid’s grief and ‘tragedie’ (in ways that extend far beyond Chaucer’s conception), so does
Heaney intrude his own presence into the fireside setting of Henryson’s long ‘winter nicht’.
When the narrator’s voice explains how ‘I began my work/ On this retelling’ it is as much
Heaney’s retelling of Henryson as it is Henryson’s retelling of Chaucer.

While Heaney downplays the difficulty of reading Middle Scots, and suggests that his task is
simply a ‘modernisation’ of Henryson, The Testament is deeply concerned with retaining what
Heaney calls the ‘imaginative sympathy’ that Henryson exhibits toward Cresseid, as well as a
desire to ‘keep the accent’ of his poetry. When the Scots threatens to become impenetrable,
Heaney simplifies and provides a cleaner modern syntax with only a nod to the ‘hidden
Scotland’ of his own native language. But occasionally, as Helen Cooney observes, Heaney
breaks the sensitivity to Henryson’s register by choosing to ‘intrude an obtrusive or seemingly
inappropriate word or phrase’. Cooney suggests that often such intrusions in fact enhance
meaning, whereby delving deeper etymologically into Heaney’s word choice reveals much
about the original poem. But these ‘intrusions’ also deepen the sense of Heaney’s presence,
so this poem becomes less a translation, and more a mediation. Heaney’s inspiration to
undertake this work was the ‘sensation of intimacy’ with Henryson’s speaker. What the reader
gains from Heaney is a sensation of welcoming intimacy conflating the personae of Heaney and
Henryson, at the same time that it draws us in to an uncomfortable intimacy with Cresseid.

Jennie Baker
University of St Andrews
jbb3@st-andrews.ac.uk

‘The music of what happens: The End of the Poem and Heaney’s Present’

One of the many ways in which Heaney’s particular technical achievements have
influenced, and continue to influence, contemporary poetic practice must be through his use
of what this paper refers to as Closural Deictic Shift, or the movement of a poem’s
coordinates, or deictic centre, in the final lines of the poem. This type of shift is increasingly
relied upon as a closural strategy, and as a signal to the reader that the poem is reaching its
end, but Heaney employs closural shift for an additional purpose: to end the poem in the
present moment, and often in the present continuous.

This paper describes Heaney’s distinctive use of this type of shifting, both as an essential
means of giving the work its celebrated immediacy, and of giving the poem its ending; a
closural preference strong enough that it may serve as an element of poetic style through
which one may trace the reaches of Heaney’s closural poetic influence. For example, can any
poet writing now use words such as ‘still’, ‘yet’, ‘now’, or ‘this’ in their final lines without
thinking of Heaney’s endings, or their sense of things continuing? While such words are
frequently employed in the closural space in order to (re)locate the end of the poem in the
present moment, they are by no means the only strategy Heaney uses to accomplish this.
Drawing examples from his poetry, this paper demonstrates a few of the ways Heaney
employs the compositional present, the poetic present, and the immediate moment as
indicated by his use of the imperative, direct address, and questions in his final lines in
order to shift his poetic endings, and to achieve specific closural effects. The paper concludes
by asking to what extent, and in which ways, this distinguishing closural preference is both
required of and reflective of Heaney’s poetics, his conceptualisation of poetry as a
transformative vision and a response or answer, his description of the ‘sensation of
rightness’ when one reads a poem which ‘makes an indelible first impression in the ear and
survives in the mind’, and his belief that ‘we go to poetry… to be forwarded within
ourselves’.

Sarah Berry
University of Connecticut
sarah.berry@uconn.edu

                                   Heaney’s Human Chains

        The title of Seamus Heaney’s final volume of poetry, Human Chain (2010),
demonstrates his recurrent interest, in both his poetry and criticism, in the way that people are
connected to one another, personally, historically, politically, and literarily. At the same time,
the ambiguity of the word “chain” suggests Heaney’s ambivalence toward such connections.
Sometimes these connections are inspiring or comforting, but they can also be painful or
confining. In this paper, I will explore the way Heaney invokes and even constructs these
human chains in his later poetry. Along the way, I will distinguish between two different
modes of invocation: intertextual, which involves cultivating lyric intimacy between poems,
and interpersonal, which involves cultivating lyric intimacy with another poet. For Heaney,
the paradoxical nature of formal intertextuality allows the poet to distance himself from the
memory of the dead without entirely forgetting them. For example, in “Audenesque,” Heaney
uses apostrophe and meter to create a simultaneous sense of simultaneity and genealogy.
        I see the early 1980s as a key turning point in his poetry, and the volumes that follow
Station Island reflect this shift in his approach to figures from the past. In order to trace a
rough outline of this trajectory, I will compare “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “Station Island,”
“Audenesque,” and a few poems in Human Chain. While the tropes and allusions Heaney
uses are not in themselves unique, Heaney puts them to a unique cultural-political use. The
relationships with these personal, political, and literary figures that Heaney constructs in his
poems are indicative of his larger mode of positioning his work in relation to his personal and
political circumstances as well as the tradition. Ultimately, I will suggest that these
intertextual and interpersonal invocations are a part of Heaney’s larger attempt to cultivate a
“displaced” perspective in his poetry, a project that is articulated in his 1985 lecture Place
and Displacement.

Don Bogen
University of Cincinnati
donald.bogen@uc.edu

"Loosening Gravity": Seamus Heaney's California of the Mind

While Seamus Heaney's year as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970-
1971 and his return as Beckman Professor in spring of 1976 had profound effects on his life and
career--including his decision to move to the Republic of Ireland and his development of "Englands
of the Mind," a pivotal essay among several exploring the role of place in his first collection of prose-
-the experience itself comes up rarely in his poetry of the 1970s. It is not mentioned at all in North
(1976) but is discussed in "Westering," the final poem of Wintering Out (1972) and two poems from
Field Work (1979): "A Postcard from North Antrim" and "The Skunk." While these three poems may
at first seem fairly minor works, they embody a distinct set of strategies and tropes in Heaney's
ongoing development of the poetry of place, one of the signature achievements of his career. These
include a form of temporal displacement that parallels the physical displacement of the two periods
he spent outside Ireland; a distinctive nocturnal atmosphere open to dreams and nostalgia; and a
particular sensuality, anchored in the olfactory, that compounds the new world of nature in
California with the more familiar desires of a decade-long marriage. Heaney's poetic engagement
with his time in Berkeley does not so much capture the experience as open paths for new ways of
exploring "the Irish memory bank," as he put it in an interview. My paper will examine the vision of
California developed in these poems and its liberating potential for Heaney's later work.

Dr. Kevin Cantwell
Middle Georgia State College (U.S.)
kevin.cantwell@mga.edu

Anagram in Heaney’s “The Early Purges”: Sense, Sentiment, and Subversion in the Political Lyric

        The painter Francis Bacon has spoken of “the brutality of fact” as he defines the degree to
which art can represent the messiness of the body and by which the corporeal glop of oil paint
conjures the flesh. Aware himself of such visceral claims, Seamus Heaney’s well-known
representations of rural life identifies initiation in a poem like “The Early Purges,” where the matter-
of-fact life of the farm sends a chill of knowledge through the young boy. Readers have noted that
sense of the poem, yet little has been made of how the rhyme scheme equivocates at one point; one
spot, where the sound is not exact, draws attention to a strategy of anagram that lets us examine
the terms of “sense” and “sentiment” as distorted echoes of an even colder worldliness of
Malthusian calculation. Early on Vendler et al. established how the greater social dimension in
Heaney’s career has vexed the bucolic with the political (SH notes this “dangerous intersection” in
citing Conor Cruise O’Brien); and it has been a touchstone for other critics to rehearse how the poet
has refused temptation into a more overt discourse on the Troubles. Indeed, the tone has been
taken to suggest that there was a lack of commitment in Heaney to choosing a side to history, and,
in a nearly twenty-five-year-old reading of the above poem, I myself chided Heaney for his stance, or
lack thereof, and will discuss—as conclusion to this now expanded understanding of the poet—how I
read an earlier version of this paper, with Heaney in the audience, and how the poet’s generous
presence and warm wave of acknowledgment at the conclusion to the paper I now remember as a
gesture that urged the me to return to the premises and test them against the facts.

Professor: Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação
Assistant Professor at Federal University of Bahia – Brazil
vivianeannunciacao@hotmail.com

S E AM U S H E A N E Y ’ S S T A T I ON I S L AN D : T H E P OL Y P H ONI C P O E T I CS   OF   E XI L E

The aim of this paper is to analyse the poem “Station Island” (Station Island, 1984) by the
poet Seamus Heaney as a ‘polyphonic poetics of exile’. Heaney’s oeuvre is impregnated with
a poetic style that combines the geographical act of frontier crossing and the linguistic work
with cultural translation. Having migrated from the North to the South of Ireland, and often,
to the United Kingdom and the United States, his poetry represents the distresses of departure
as a continuous search for a translational mode. This is seen not only in his constant work
with tradition, but also in the literal appropriation of literary voices in a poetic heteroglossia.
This technique is observed in the long poem “Station Island” in which his subjective voice
assumes different personae with whom he establishes a mythic dialogue verbalizing, then, his
personal anguish of leaving Northern Ireland at the onset of the Troubles in 1972.

Rui Carvalho Homem
Universidade do Porto, Portugal
rchomem@netcabo.pt

On authorship and intermediality in Seamus Heaney: ‘I can connect / Some
bits and pieces’

This paper aims to extend our understanding of the role that intermediality can play in processes of
identity formation, with a particular bearing on the construction of authorship in the poetry of
Seamus Heaney.

       Heaney’s work offers several intriguing examples of the imaginative empowerment afforded
by medial encounters (such as those that involve texts and images), with a particular impact on self-
representation. In ‘Vitruviana’ he retrieves an early seaside memory to refract (half-tongue-in-cheek)
a remembered posture of his youthful self through a key image in European culture, Leonardo’s
‘Vitruvian man’. The poet’s awareness of the potential crassness in his verbal appropriation of the
most emblematic Renaissance representation of human centrality, or ‘man as a measure of all
things,’ comes through also in his ekphrastic rendering of another and possibly antithetical visual
foregrounding of the human, Giotto’s Stigmatization of St Francis. In yet another case, the poet
interrogates the tension between lyrical self-representation and a visual ‘version’ of himself in the
form of a portrait reproduced on the back cover of one of his collections – a piece that highlights the
agon between text and image as regards their ability to represent a selfhood. My paper will offer a
discussion of such medial transits, involving Heaney’s verbal representations of his formative
experience and key visual artefacts in the European cultural memory, in order to tease out the
challenges (and opportunities) that intermediality can bring to a delineation of authorial identity.

Li Chengjian
School of Foreign Languages,
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
lichengjian623@hotmail.com

                       On Seamus Heaney Study in China

Proposal:

My speech is to cover two aspects: to recall my short stay in Heaney Center and to make a
survey of Seamus Heaney Study in China.

Abstract:

Seamus Heaney was first introduced into mainland China in 1987. In the following 26 years,
works introduction and academic studies on Heaney have been deepening and widening in
China. Heaney is well-known as a great poet, a translator and a dramatist, being famous for
his retrospection of Irish history and persistent pursuit for cultural identity. In addition,
Heaney’s fame has been widely spread and publicized by such Medias as newspaper and
internet in the context of the rapid development of Sino-Irish relationship in politics,
economics and culture exchange. Heaney turns up to be an advertisement for Irish national
literature and tourism in a public eye.

Catriona Clutterbuck,
University College Dublin,
Catriona.Clutterbuck@ucd.ie

Being ‘pilot and stray in one’: Sustaining Nothingness in the Travel Poems of Early Heaney

This paper explores how Heaney comes to terms with the ethical challenge of nothingness –
understood in terms of evacuated or disintegrating identity, limits and knowing - in poems from the
1960s and 70s in which travel motifs or motifs of geographical distance and proximity, are central.
The paper argues that nothingness is the correlative (not the opposite) of boundlessness in Heaney’s
thought: nothingness paradoxically anchors even as it interrogates his idea of creative freedom. The
celebration of boundlessness as a keynote of this poet’s aesthetic, is usually associated with the later
rather than the earlier Heaney. The critical code for this boundlessness – the idea that the poet’s
focus shifted definitively away from embracing the earth towards releasing himself as air-borne
somewhere around the mid-1980s - has become a reductive truism insofar as it neglects the
challenge of nothingness as subtending and supporting such lift-off. (This is the case,
notwithstanding the fact that nothingness is far more directly apparent in the poetry of the last
decade of Heaney’s life where mortality and participative anonymity become core concerns. )
However, early poems using travel motifs like ‘The Peninsula’, ‘Funeral Rites’ and ‘Oysters’, establish
the core questions in Heaney’s career-long investigation of the value of nothingness in mediating the
relationships between containment and expansion, definition and indeterminism, order and
disorder, possession and dispossession, belonging and alienation, the ordinary and the
extraordinary , and faith and doubt in his work.

Dr. Brendan Corcoran
Indiana State University
brendan.corcoran@indstate.edu

“Seamus Heaney’s Cured Wound”

Abstract:

This paper addresses Seamus Heaney persistent work as an elegist. It explores the manner in
which Heaney’s elegiac practice specifically conserves death as a “cured wound” in the space of
poetry, paradoxically making death come alive as a constitutive force in the lyric.1 The paper
addresses poems ranging from the bog body poems of North to the later self-elegaic
manifestations of The Tollund Man (Redivivus?) in “District and Circle” and “The Tollund Man
in Springtime,” but it focuses on the the various ways the elegiac is utilized and theorized
throughout Human Chain. So much of Heaney’s poetry, from early to late, explores what remains
in the aftermath of loss: the wound in the mind or in the artifactual remainder of “what
happens”—poetry itself.2 I study Heaney’s modeling of the tension between the elegy’s own
compensatory strategies, which hold out the prospect of healing such wounds, and the genre’s,
like the art form’s, inscription of loss into the world, its fixing of loss (both raw and moderated)
in time. Like his great exemplars Yeats, Hardy, Hughes, or Milosz, Heaney’s repeated efforts to
apprehend human life in extremis produce poetry that testifies to the difficult conjunction of
“beauty and atrocity” within the space of poetry.3 Central to this paper’s thinking about Heaney’s
elegiac poetics is the notion that specifically at this conjunction of the cure and the wound, we
find Heaney’s persistent (if persistently challenged) faith in poetry’s capacity as an ultimately
marvelous, healing art—an art that heals not in any cloying manner but in a way that forcefully
(and even brutally) affirms the fundamental worth of human experience and resistance to the
ebb tide of mortality itself.

1
  Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 110.
2
  Heaney, Opened Ground 173.
3
  Heaney, Opened Ground 111.

Patricia Craig
patricia.craig7@btinternet.com

Station Island Revisited

Seamus Heaney has described his “Station Island” sequence as “an examination of
conscience”. The phrase was current during his Catholic upbringing, trotted out as the
prelude to the making of an actual confession, on one knees before a priest; but it is given a
much wider application here. The religious dimension of the “examination of conscience” is
recast in secular terms, with historical, literary, political, personal, even topographical
undercurrents all making for an illuminating and invigorating approach. Catholicism is an
inheritance but not a guideline - the guidelines here allow for complexity and dissent. In the
course of the sequence a lot of things are crystallised and resolved, including unsettling
pressures such as the pressure to conform to a tribal imperative. As Heaney’s friend Karl
Miller put it in one of his essays, “There are many ways for a poet to be political ...”, some
more overt than others.

 “Station Island’, Lough Derg, is not a religious poem, and you certainly can’t call it
“confessional” either: it is far too subtle, resonant and allusive to fall into the “tell all”
category. Its antecedents are well known and include the Eliot of “Little Gidding” with its
“familiar compound ghost” - and of course Dante, though as Heaney says, both hell and
heaven are missing from the sequence, leaving just purgatory. St Patrick’s Purgatory, to be
precise, on the island in Lough Derg which has drawn pilgrims from the twelfth century on.
The poem can be read in different ways - as an assertion of ancestral affinities, an
acknowledgement of a kind of continuity, a declaration of independence, a summoning up
of dead “fosterers” - Heaney’s word - a hesitant apologia (not apology), a rich interfusion of
evocation, individuality and authenticity. (It might be interesting to consider responses to
the poem on its first appearance; its importance was generally recognised.)

Dr Adam Crothers
St John’s College, Cambridge
ac405@cam.ac.uk

‘Darkness echoing’:
In/di/visible rhyming in Heaney and Hill

‘I rhyme | To see myself, to set the darkness echoing’: the final sentence of Seamus
Heaney’s first collection is pleasant to quote, and might inspire good work from poets
writing in Heaney’s wake. But to what extent is the attitude actually evident in
Heaney’s poetry? Assuming that ‘to rhyme’ is to write rhyming poems rather than to
write verse more broadly, how often does Heaney’s rhyming enable or enforce
selfexamination and echoes in the dark; and when Heaney does not rhyme, is there a
suggestion that the self is not being examined, and that the darkness is left silent?

The aim of this paper is to suggest a few things about how rhyme behaves in
Heaney’s writing, where rather than a guiding principle in its own right (as in Paul
Muldoon’s poetry) it is a device whose employment is subject to poem-specific
inclinations. Andrew Osborn has suggested that Heaney's half rhyme is suggestive of
both that which has been weathered, worn down, and that which has weathered,
survived, and I will consider what is gained or lost in Heaney’s favouring rhyme’s
conclusive, clinching power over its generative, discomfiting potential.

This will involve discussing the rhyming of such compositions as ‘Antaeus’ from
North and ‘The Toome Road’ from Field Work, and the poems of Human Chain; by way
of comparison I will look at Geoffrey Hill's recent return to explicitly self-conscious
rhyming, and how this develops what an earlier poem calls ‘fictive consonance’. As
A.V.C. Schmidt gave the title ‘Darkness Echoing’ to a 1985 essay on mythopoeia in
Heaney and Hill, I will address some of that piece’s concerns in my paper, all while
wondering if it matters, to Heaney’s poetry or to his legacy, that ‘hope and history’ do
not, in fact, rhyme.

Grzegorz Czemiel, PhD
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (Lublin, Poland)
czemiel@o2.pl

‘Where does spirit live?’ Seeing Things in the light of object-oriented ontology

Seamus Heaney’s predilection for metaphysics, which he expresses in the
collection Seeing Things, finds an unexpected ally in the form of Graham Harman,
founder of the metaphysical movement referred to as object-oriented philosophy.
Taking cue from his works, I would like to propose an original interpretation of Seeing
Things from the perspective of Harman’s ‘speculative realism.’

Graham Harman furthers Martin Heidegger’s tool-analysis and the category of
presence-at-hand to argue that broadly understood ‘objects’ are always ‘lurking
beneath their outward effects, but they are also something real that cannot be
decomposed into tinier fragments.’ Thus, he proposes an ontology in which all things
retain distinctive essences that are nevertheless finite and only indirectly accessible.
Consequently, relishing the mutability of surface reality, the American philosopher also
invites us to ‘look for the soul of the thing.’

This approach corresponds in many ways with what we encounter in Seeing
Things. Heaney also seems to be concerned with the ‘ground of being.’ Fathoming
various depths (like the iconic bog), he arrives at metaphysical conclusions like ‘the
stone’s alive with what’s invisible,’ which confirm Harman’s thesis that we have no
access to real objects. On the other hand, Heaney immerses himself in ‘shifting
brilliancies’ and ardently studies the surface of all things material, discovering – as in
the case of the pitchfork or the bike – the inexhaustible nature of things. Thus, he
ultimately reconciles the deep and the shallow (‘Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed
be highs!’).

Therefore, Heaney’s ‘squarings’ with reality, whose dazzling effect originates in trying
to ‘be literal a moment,’ approximate Harman’s ‘weird realism,’ ultimately redefining
the notion of ‘realist’ literature and steering clear of philosophical trench wars between
scientism and humanism.

Joan Dargan
St. Lawrence University
jdargan@stlawu.edu

       SEAMUS HEANEY : THE GREAT WAR AND BOUNDS OF HISTORY
                            AND SPEECH

This paper will look at Seamus Heaney’s appreciation of The Sleeping Lord by David Jones,
his poem « In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge » and introduction to Ledwidge’s Selected
Poems, and « In a Field, » the poem written last year in reponse to Edward Thomas’s « As
the Team’s Head Brass » and published in the anthology 1914 : Poetry Remembers. The
great imaginative sympathy characterizing these works by Heaney no doubt springs in part
from the influence of his early memories of soldiers training for the Normandy landings near
his childhood home and from a sense of kinship with his three subjects who communicate a
deeply felt reverence for the land.

Consistent with other of his excavations, Heaney brings past and present into single focus,
makes them immediate, without fanfare. Unlike Jones, he does not weave different temporal
and geographic strands in and around an expanding, or even exploding, framework ; the
influence of Modernism is discreet. Heaney explores the ironies inherent in Ledwidge’s
donning of his « Tommy’s uniform » with delicacy and pays him the tribute of
circumspection, declining to assign meaning to his death, a form of respect extended
implicitly to Thomas as well. And Heaney’s poem « In a Field » achieves a wholly
astonishing effect of surprise, and reversion to silence, a dark recasting of the triumph of the
wind in « Postcript », as he translates the shock of the encounter at war’s end of two
incompatible worlds of experience that somehow must meet the requirement of coexistence.
This exemplary poet subtly brings us again and again to the brink where speech and
speechlessness meet in the attempt to grasp time’s claims on us and begin to flow together.

LeeAnn Derdeyn
University of Texas at Dallas
LeeAnn.Derdeyn@utdallas.edu

Proposal for “Heaney and America” panel
“Opened Ground: Ireland and America. The Rural Roots of Seamus Heaney and Christian Wiman”

I wish to propose a paper that examines Seamus Heaney as a rural poet of Ireland in juxtaposition
and context with a rural poet of America, Christian Wiman, recent editor of Poetry Magazine.

There are many aesthetic congruences within the work of Heaney and Wiman. Both poets began
their careers writing about what they knew: the land, crops, water sources, the wildlife that
frequented the land and water sources, and the oddities of the human wildlife that populated the
rural landscape. They both wrote of things commonplace to a population of ‘countryfolk.’ What
Heaney knew was a forge, the dying art of a smith or bog harvests, his mother’s gardening or food
preparation. Wiman’s door in the dark was to a well house or a storm cellar. His grandmother and
great-aunt were practicing the dying agrarian arts of cotton picking, or canning vegetables,
preserving fruit. Both poets spoke of the strangeness of modernity’s invasions—the trains,
telephone lines, electrical poles hyphenating the landscape. Both poets refused the pastoral in their
experiences and admitted violence resonant in their soundscapes. Both poets wrote formally,
became interested in the classics, began writing non-fictively about their craft, undertook
translations as interactions with foreign poets. Both Heaney and Wiman became cosmopolitans,
travelers conversant with urban words and ways; and yet, the two poets commingled the foreign
with the native, the new and the old, in their art in ways that never severed their cultural roots.

This consideration of Heaney and Wiman as rural poets will suggest fruitful new ways of considering
how poetry opens dialogs across borders, intimates shared experiences, and forges communalities.
Plus, it will be fun, rewarding, and intriguing to conjointly delve into the works of two consummate
craftsmen.

Anne Devlin
anne.devlin1@virgin.net

Heaney and the mantle of Aeschylus: the aftermath of the war.

The most dramatic opening moments in Western Theatre Literature is the scanning of the dark for
the fire. It is given to the voice of the Watch at the start of Aeschylus’ great trilogy The Oresteia,
about the aftermath of the Trojan War. It is this moment Heaney takes for his 1998 dramatic
monologue: Mycenae Lookout in The Spirit Level. This paper argues that in 1998 when he found
himself in Greece receiving news of his Noble Prize Heaney found the confidence to experiment
further with the dramatic monologue ( which he uses to great effect in much of his poetry) when he
chooses this dramatic form he found himself at the end of his own Watch on the hillside. For
Aeschylus the eruption or arrival of the flame marks the end of the Watch’s involvement with us in
the first play of the trilogy: the death of Agamemnon. In Heaney’s version the sighting of the flame is
connected with a call or calling. So the poet chooses to chart the aftermath from the persona of the
Watch; in fact he collapses the dialogue and condenses the entire first play into five short
monologues. The most recent production of the Oresteia was by the poet Ted Hughes which opened
at the National in 1999, one year after Heaney’s monologue. It took three days to perform. In
Stepping Stones Heaney comments on his friend’s achievement when he says:` I think Hughes was
closer to the shaman than the senate. ‘ This paper argues in fact that the Shaman was what Heaney
made of the Watch in Mycenae Lookout. And that this dimension ( the possession of the character
by what he is witnessing) becomes clear when the dramatic monologue is read aloud, when an
embodiment occurs ; precisely a comment on the trauma of aftermath. Should we regret that
Heaney did not sustain his engagement with the mantle of Aeschylus, but instead continued his
exploration of the political realities of the aftermath through the work of Sophocles?

Stephen Enniss, Director
The University of Texas at Austin
enniss@austin.utexas.edu

Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Poetic Acts of Self-Definition

"What Seamus Heaney has done for the rural hinterland of Ulster, Mahon does for the
shipyards and backstreets,” Michael Longley wrote in 1968. Seamus Heaney was closely
associated with Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, and in their early years the three poets
defined their poetic identities in relation to one another. The friends confided their poetic
ambitions to one another, laid claim to competing Irish traditions, toured together, and shared
stages and radio broadcasts. Inevitably they conceived their work in relation to the other. In
all of these ways and more, Heaney and Mahon crafted individual talents with a high degree
of consciousness of the other. I will draw upon my forthcoming biography of Derek Mahon
to illuminate these connections and tensions. I will examine the terms Heaney and Mahon
chose for their own self-presentation in the 1960s and 1970s (the years of most frequent
contact) and the way in which these acts of self definition were part of a persistent poetic
dialogue with its own inherent dependencies and need.

Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at
Austin. He did his undergraduate studies at Davidson College, followed by a library degree
from Emory University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia. He
previously served as Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and, before
that, Director of Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. While at
Emory he was responsible for many major acquisitions, among them the archives Seamus
Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. He is currently completing a biography After
the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon.

Dr Andrew Fitzsimons
Gakushuin University,
Tokyo
ayfitzs@parkcity.ne.jp

Mundus et Infans: After-time and the Child in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

In a colloquium on the work of Czeslaw Milosz held in April 1998, Seamus Heaney elucidates the
importance to him of the particular form of perspective found in Milosz’s poem ‘The World’, and,
quoting from the section ‘From the Window’, reads in terms that allude to the ambitions of his own
work. The poem, he says, is ‘binocular, seeing things from the top of the high mountain and from the
back of the child’s eye’. This mode of vision is deliberate on Milosz’s part and evokes for Heaney
another deliberate ‘poetic strategy’, that of Virgil’s Eclogues’ in which, he says, ‘the Roman poet sees
the hard social and political realities of Augustus’s Italy through eyes that had once opened innocently
on the childhood world of his father’s farm’. That Heaney’s reading of Milosz and Virgil has
implications for his own poetic strategies and practice is obvious, but what I would like to do in this
paper is pair the exacerbated, extreme perspective invoked here by Heaney with another no less
relevant form of double perspective, again in the context of the world and the child, that of ‘the after-
time’ introduced at the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the anticipated perspective through
which event will come to be pictured. I hope to show how central this form of anticipated perspective
is in Heaney, from Death of a Naturalist to Human Chain, and how awareness of this centrality has
implications not only for our understanding of how his work relates to poetic antecedents such as
Wordsworth and Frost, but also for the debates concerning the apparent conservatism of Heaney’s
lyric voice.

Toshi Furomoto
Kobe Univ. in Japan (retired)
furomoto@bcb.bai.ne.jp

Strongly Spent is Kept --    Tradition of Generosity (Summary)

In many obituaries we read how generous Heaney was in every way. From three
different private occasions I have had the same experience and confirmed my impression
that it is an indispensable quality of an excellent teacher to be ready to respond
the student’s necessity. Heaney was frank to admit how exhaustive it is to run
a work shop of poetry, but it seemed a greater joy for him to satisfy the expectation
from students and audience. Here we can find a man who loves talking about the truth
as exactly as possible.

On one occasion of his favor Heaney gave me an anthology with an inscription quoted
from Robert Frost. ‘Strongly spent is kept.’ Frost a great poet-teacher provided Heaney
an example to show the dual nature of that critical position as ‘appreciator’ and ‘adjudicator’.
Heaney the poet must have been aware of the importance of the role of critic and educator
to promulgate the cause of poetry perse and its social responsibility.

And another function of the poet-teacher is to bridge the two orders of mystery and
common sense; in a larger sense it can be to mediate two conflicting elements in society.
The ‘appease’ or ‘exacerbate’ are one of the significant pairs in Heaney’s critical ideas.
That function of an excellent teacher-poet is a sort of go-between to connect the creation
and appreciation. The teacher is expected to read carefully, think intensely, and to explicate
persuasively. Thus the poet-critic bridges the two orders, the practical and the poetic.
the utilitarian and the aesthetic. And the words used for the first order are social and
functional and the other authentic and private. And the ability to talk the mystery of
the private world in socially creditable terms is echoing W.H.Auden on Yeats, strength and
clarity.

Dr. Barbara Gerner de García
Gallaudet University
Barbara.gerner.de.garcia@gallaudet.edu

Heaney in Translation: The written word transformed by sign language

In his Nobel lecture, Heaney reflected on his childhood in rural County Derry in the 1940’s as a “pre-
literate” time for him. The radio transported him on his “journey into the wideness of the world.
This, in turn, became a journey into the wideness of language.” Seamus Heaney was a gifted
translator as well as a poet, and his poetry unsurprisingly has been translated into many languages.

Languages that Heaney may not have considered are the sign languages of deaf people. Sign
languages use the movement of hands and body, and facial expressions to convey meaning. They are
natural languages with their own grammars, and are independent of the spoken language(s) in their
environments. English is the common spoken language in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland,
and the United States yet there are three different sign languages – American Sign Language (ASL),
British Sign Language (BSL) and Irish Sign Language (ISL). As of 2004, both BSL and ISL are recognized
as official languages in Northern Ireland.

I have taught Heaney poems in an undergraduate course on Irish culture at a university for deaf
students in the United States. Poetry in spoken/written languages is experienced through reading
and listening. While my students read English, translating poems into ASL reveals the emotion and
meaning they contain. Rather than a word for word translation, a sign language translation creates a
visual representation that conveys the poem’s meaning.

   In this presentation, I will show a videotaped translation by deaf students of a Heaney poem into
ASL. I will describe the process of translating, including the use and meaning of visual imagery,
cinematic techniques, and discuss the idea that translation into a visual/gestural language, while
transformative of the form, conveys the poet’s intent.

Donald Givans
The University of Aberdeen
r01dgg13@abdn.ac.uk

     Old Axles and Iron Hoops: Seamus Heaney and the Conflicted Sonnet

My paper explores the sonnet in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, considering Heaney’s sonnets as
renegotiations of formal conventions and literary precedents, and addressing the politics of form
within Irish and British lyric traditions. Drawing on various sonnets, sonnet-sequences, and relevant
material, I will present a dialogic approach to Heaney’s experimentation with the sonnet form.
Individual poems such as “Gone”, “The Forge”, “Requiem for the Croppies”, and “Out of Shot”, will
be considered comparatively, with reference to the sonnet-sequences of “Act of Union”, “Glanmore
Sonnets”, and “Clearances”. “The Forge”, with its ‘old axles and iron hoops’ – the bearings around
which wheels turn and bindings within which contents are contained – provides an early example of
Heaney’s “conflicted” sonnetry. The ‘short-pitched ring’ of poetic inspiration, the ‘unpredictable
fantail of sparks’ that makes a poem, suggests that what is assumed of the sonnet from the ‘Outside’
– the reader’s perspective – the “predictable” volta, octave and sestet that turn and bind, are from
the ‘Inside’ – the maker’s perspective – not yet ‘hammered’ into shape. In “The Forge” a Petrarchan,
or Italian sonnet-structure, suggested by the rhymes of the octave, turns to ‘clatter’ in the irregularly
of the sestet-rhymes. Heaney’s experimentation is furthered and deepened when he ‘expends
himself in shape and music’ reworking the sonnet’s formal and thematic conventions to explore Irish
and British exchanges. Discussing the composition of “Glanmore Sonnets” (III), Heaney described his
unease with ‘the melodious grace of the English iambic line’, that it was a ‘kind of affront, that it
needed to be wrecked’. This Shakespearean, or English sonnet, uneasily rhyming ‘corncrake’ with
‘iambic’, is another example of a form that, in Heaney’s hands, both ‘Refreshes and relents’.

Stephen Grace
University of York
swg500@york.ac.uk

‘anglings, aimings, feints and squints’: Heaney’s sense of space.
In spite of a strong feeling for histories of all kinds Seamus Heaney was, as Bernhard Klein has
noted, ‘more interested in space than in time’4, and often converted the later into the former,
most famously in his bog poems. Conceptualised by Heaney himself as ‘the memory of the
landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it’5, and
represented by the short, four lined consonantal stanzas that populate much of Wintering
Out (1972) and North (1975), the bog remains, for many critics, Heaney’s stand out
achievement.        However, as Klein also observes, this inerasable memory ‘privileges
preservation over change’ and after 1975’s North Heaney’s poetry ‘is frequently set in a self-
consciously liminal, intermediary or transitional location, far away from the bog: the beach,
strand or coast’6. This paper will consider Heaney’s sonnets, and the twelve-line form of his
‘Squarings’ sequence (1991), as instances of such ‘transitional’ spaces, and examine how
these forms develop out of their antecedents: the sonnet from the bog-poem, the twelve-
liner from the sonnet. By tracing the evolution of Heaney’s forms out of the bog’s restrictive
stanzas and into, initially, the longer, agricultural rhythms of the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ and
then, more radically in ‘Clearances’ and ‘Squarings’, into what Helen Vendler has called ‘a
poetics of “airy listening”’7, I will argue that Heaney’s most comprehensive sense of space
does not lie in the static bog, but in ‘those anglings, aimings, feints and squints’8 he uses to
define the term ‘Squarings’, and that it is in these improvised, ephemeral moments, no less
real than the bog for being less physically present, indeed in some respects more real for
being less physically present, that his most enduring legacy lies.

4On the Uses of History in Recent Irish Writing, (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2007), p. 133
5   Preoccupations, (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 54
6   Ibid. 139
7Souls Says: On Recent Poetry, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p.
207
8   Seeing Things, (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 57

Sammye C. Greer, Professor Emerita
Wittenberg University
sgreer2@woh.rr.com

            “The Sharping Stone” and an Elegiac Consolation for our Time

The relation of Seamus Heaney’s elegies to traditional elegiac poetry is the subject of discussion in
several critical works. For example, Jahan Ramazani asserts that “[w]hile questioning, analyzing, and
even attacking the elegy’s major subgenres and conventions, Heaney . . . energetically reclaims them
for our time” (337); and Stephen Regan raises a fundamental question: “How can the mythic
structures and traditional sources of consolation inherent in the [elegiac] genre continue to function
in an age of skepticism and disbelief?” (19).

“The Sharping Stone” serves as a touchstone for both of these observations by exhibiting Heaney’s
appropriation of various structures and conventions of the classical and the English elegy. This paper
concentrates on Heaney’s transformation of one of these components of the genre, the consolation,
which he distinguished by indirection, inversion, paradox and irony as well as by an affirmation of
what he calls in The Redress of Poetry “ a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is
denied or constantly threatened by circumstances” (4). He arrives at this consoling principle through
a dialectical presentation – in the second and third parts of the poem – of an over-arching trope, the
description of two recumbent couples, one experiencing an ecstatic moment in one of Ireland’s
forest parks, the other, long dead but represented in a moment of marital bliss by the sculpture on
the lid of a sarcophagus. By considering the relation between these two scenes and the thematic
dialectic between the two stanzas, the paper calls attention to one of Heaney’s most significant
achievements within the genre.

                                  Works Cited

Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996.

Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Reagan, Stephen. “Seamus Heaney and the Modern Irish Elegy.” Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic,
Translator. Ed. Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 9-
25.

Dr Gillian Groszewski,
Trinity College, Dublin
ggroszew@tcd.ie

                  ‘The Politics of Friendship’: Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney

The friendship between Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney has been considered by several
critics in brief comparisons of their work and is the subject of a recent overview essay by Henry
Hart (2012). Apart from dwelling on the poets’ comparable poetic representations of the
natural world and Heaney’s early indebtedness to Hughes as an influence, however, critics
have failed to consider the ways in which Hughes’s and Heaney’s friendship affected their
poetry in any great detail. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship
(1997) and Heaney’s essay on Hughes, ‘Englands of the Mind’ (1976), this paper will examine
the ‘politics of friendship’ in the poetry of Hughes and Heaney suggesting this approach as an
interesting new way to consider their influence on one another.

        Following his appointment to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, Hughes claimed that
Heaney would be ‘the first successful advocate, in England, for Ireland’s side of all the cases’
(Letters of Ted Hughes 565). Through readings of Hughes’s Laureate poems and Heaney’s
North (1976), this paper looks at how both poets dealt with the question of nationalism in
their work but from two opposite ends of a very complex Anglo-Irish political spectrum.
Drawing on archival work, the paper then explores Hughes’s influence on Heaney’s Electric
Light (2001) through a consideration of Heaney’s ‘Red, White and Blue’, a poem that was
directly inspired by Heaney’s reading of Hughes’s Birthday Letters in manuscript. From
‘Englands of the Mind’ and North to ‘Red, White and Blue’ and Birthday Letters, this paper
traces the political subtext discernible in writings by Hughes and Heaney that were inspired
by one another suggesting that close consideration of this subtext is vital to understanding
both the writing and the friendship.

Dr Adam Hanna
University of Aberdeen
adam.hanna@abdn.ac.uk

                      Seamus Heaney’s Uncertainty at the Threshold

The farmhouse at Mossbawn in which Seamus Heaney spent his childhood was, in his
imagination, at once a firmly-bounded familial shelter and a site of interplay and engagement
with the world beyond it. In this paper I explore the moments in his poetry when the threshold
of this family farm is approached by three ambiguous embodiments of both friendship and
potentially-hostile power: one neighbour (a powerfully ambiguous word in Heaney’s lexicon)
who is a demobbed soldier; a second who is an evangelical member of Northern Ireland’s
Protestant majority; and a third who is the son of a member of the security forces. In my paper
I will examine both the house’s occupants and the neighbours who visit them as they all hesitate
at the threshold.

I will relate Heaney’s preoccupation with images of the political and religious Other at the
house’s limits to his conflicted stance towards the Northern Ireland of his time. The hesitations
which are such a prominent feature of these liminal encounters are closely linked, I argue, to
Heaney’s internal debates about what he was prepared to include in his poetry; about the limits
of his own sympathies and identifications; and about the extent to which accommodative or
resistant impulses should guide him in his writing. I identify in Heaney’s work a prominent
strand of self-questioning as to the correct stance to take in relation to wider Northern Irish
politics – one which acknowledges the intimacy that exists alongside enmity. By laying the
emphasis on moments of uncertainty in Heaney’s poems I wish to suggest new ways of thinking
about the politics that underlie them.