Abstract
References to ‘home’ and ‘exile’ abound in discussions of Heaney’s work, and when the poet talks about his own writing. Although he broke with familial tradition in becoming a writer, a city-dweller, a member of the middle class, his poetry to the present bears witness to a continuity of spirit with his parents and a fidelity to his origins, of race and place. In a 1979 interview with John Haffenden, he suggests that reports that he has become a ‘déraciné’ are greatly exaggerated:
I’m very close to home. I’ve two homes: this house and the house where I was brought up. When I go back, my father and mother are still alive, my brothers and sisters still around the place, I merge into it. One deracinates oneself, and I’m not sure I have done so.3
The wise man who sits at home, travels a bit in his heart, while the wise man who goes away sits at home to some extent.1
An Irish poet has access to all this (English literary tradition) through his use of the English language, but he is unlikely to feel at home in it.
Thomas Kinsella2
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Notes
Seamus Heaney, quoted in Mid-Ulster Mail, June 6, 1984. The origin may be Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool, Penguin, p. 236.
Mark Patrick Hederman, ‘Poetry and the Fifth Province’, The Crane Bag, 9, 1, 1985, pp. 112–113.
Sean O’Faolain, quoted on the dust cover of Collected Short Stories of Michael McLaverty, Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1978.
Kenneth Neill, An Illustrated History of the Irish People, Gill and Macmillan, 1979, p. 22.
Seamus Heaney, quoted in Michael Allen’s ‘Provincialism and Recent Irish Poetry’, in Two Decades of Irish Writing, ed. Douglas Dunn, Manchester: Carcanet, 1975.
Patrick Kavanagh, quoted in Terence Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, Dublin, 1975, p. 218.
Thomas Kinsella, in Myth and Reality in Irish Literature, ed. Ronsley, Wilfrid Laurier Press, Ontario, 1977, p. 10.
Robin Skelton, Introduction to Six Irish Poets, Oxford University Press, 1962, p. xiv.
John Montague, Introduction to Poisoned Lands, first edition 1961, new edition, Dolmen Press, Portlaoise, 1977, p. 9.
Frank Ormsby, in the introduction to his anthology, Poets from the North of Ireland, Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1979, p. 7.
The poem appeared in Skelton’s anthology, Six Irish Poets, Oxford University Press, 1962. A revised version can be found in John Montague, The Rough Field, Dolmen Press, Portlaoise, 1972, pp. 15–16. In the revised version the uncle’s tunes have changed to ‘The Morning Star’ and the historically emotive ‘O’Neill’s Lament’.
T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets, Faber, 1944, new edition 1959, p. 24.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 1596, ed. W. L. Renwick, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 39.
Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1924, new edition 1967, p. 108.
Heaney, Among Schoolchildren, A John Malone Memorial Lecture 1983, p. 11. See Chapter Five, dealing with ‘Station Island, XII.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Panther Books, 1984, p. 184.
Seamus Heaney, Among Schoolchildren, Malone Lecture 1983, p. 9.
R. S. Thomas. ‘A Peasant’, Sons at the Year’s Turning, Hart Davis, 1955, p. 21.
Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle, 1986, p. 144.
Norman McCaig, Old Maps and New: Selected Poems, Hogarth Press, 1978, p. 20. The poem ‘Climbing Suilven’ first appeared in Riding Lights, 1955.
The title of Chapter One of Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making, London: Faber, 1967.
Both poems encapsulate what Camus has called ‘the primitive hostility of the world … facing us across the millenia’ (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Penguin, 1955, p. 20). Although Heaney’s and Hughes’s concern with animals springs from childhood experience of farms and country tracts, literary experience and history have equally shaped and determined their poetic response and philosophy. Within Hughes, one detects the strong influence of Blake, who equally delighted in energy and ‘fearful symmetry’ and raged against the mechanistic thought of Locke and Newton, which cages mankind by denying faith and inspiration. Perhaps it is not fanciful to compare Blake’s rejection of the worship of Reason with Heaney’s and Hughes’s reaction against what Edward Lucie-Smith has called the ‘balanced’ banality of some of the so-called Movement poets, whose ‘prissily decorous’ verse rarely ‘moved’ (see British Poetry since 1945, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 136). Reacting in turn against Dylan Thomas, the New Lines tribunes endeavoured to banish Coriolanus and replace him with poets such as Elizabeth Jennings
Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney: A Student Guide, Faber, 1986, p. 20.
In Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, ed. Michael Longley, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971, p. 54.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Macmillan, 1975, p. 44.
Theodore Roethke, Collected Poems, London: Faber, 1968, p. 35.
Robert Kee, Ireland: A History, Abacus, 1982, p. 232.
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© 1993 Michael Parker
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Parker, M. (1993). Affinities, 1961–66. In: Seamus Heaney. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390256_2
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