Foreword

Baldwin Professor in Humanities; Director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Seamus Heaney lived nearly all of his writing life in public view. He published his first collection in 1966 with Faber when he was in his mid-twenties and his last in 2010, three years before he died in 2013. By then, he was a Nobel Laureate, a national figure on the island of Ireland and the symbol for many of a literary tradition whose fellows are Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. These lineages quickly date, as is certainly true of Heaney, who was first read as a nature poet in the mode of Ted Hughes before being cast as a northern writer framed by the latest phase of a century of Irish troubles. Both perspectives show a partial truth, but art has always the capacity to exceed its circumstances. Sometimes this happens in a poem that seems to have come from nowhere. At others, the right word or phrase emerges as the consequence of a lifetime’s waiting and working. Heaney experienced both kinds of arrival, usually in one of the quiet places he needed to write. Heaney associated poetry with solitude and withdrawal into a place of refuge, such as he imagined Glanmore cottage in Wicklow and later his attic office in Sandymount, by the sea. Withdrawn, he wrote poems that shed light on landscapes of memory that opened out as he aged, making familiar places new in a natural extension of a poetry he had spent decades working over.