Editing Seamus Heaney (section)

==Work==
{{Quote box |width=300px|align=right|quoted=true|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|salign=left|quote =

In order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them.

|source =—from "''Joy Or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin''", W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture delivered by Seamus Heaney at University College of Swansea on 18 January 1993.}}

===Naturalism===
At one time Heaney's books made up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the UK.<ref name=bbc_faces_of_the_week/> His work often deals with the local surroundings of Ireland, particularly in Northern Ireland, where he was born and lived until young adulthood. Speaking of his early life and education, he commented, "I learned that my local County Derry experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to 'the modern world', was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it."<ref name=poetry_foundation/> ''Death of a Naturalist'' (1966) and ''Door into the Dark'' (1969) mostly focus on the details of rural, parochial life.<ref name=poetry_foundation/>

In a number of volumes, beginning with ''Door into the Dark'' (1969) and ''Wintering Out'' (1972), Heaney also spent a significant amount of time writing on the northern Irish bog. Particularly of note is the collection of bog body poems in [[North (poetry collection)|''North'']] (1975), featuring mangled bodies preserved in the bog. In a review by Ciaran Carson, he said that the bog poems made Heaney into "the laureate of violence—a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing...the world of megalithic doorways and charming noble barbarity."<ref>{{Cite book |last=O'Donoghue |first=Bernard |title=The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney |date=2009 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |page=4}}</ref> Poems such as "Bogland" and "Bog Queen" addressed political struggles directly for the first time.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Irene Gilsenan Nordin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0LZlAAAAMAAJ |title=The body and desire in contemporary Irish poetry |publisher=Irish Academic Press |year=2006 |isbn=978-0-7165-3368-9 |page=5}}</ref>

===Politics===
Allusions to sectarian differences, widespread in Northern Ireland throughout his lifetime, can be found in his poems.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Ciarán O'Rourke |date=10 October 2020 |title=Did Seamus Heaney Write Political Poems? |url=https://independentleft.ie/seamus-heaney-political-poems/ |website=[[Independent Left (Ireland)]]}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Ezgi Ustundag |title=Expressing Humanity During 'The Troubles:' The Poetry of Seamus Heaney |url=https://trinity.duke.edu/node/1637 |website=[[Duke University]]}}</ref> His books ''Wintering Out'' (1973) and ''North'' (1975) seek to interweave commentary on [[the Troubles]] with a historical context and wider human experience.<ref name="poetry_foundation">{{Cite news |title=Biography |url=http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/seamus-heaney |work=Poetry Foundation}}</ref> While some critics accused Heaney of being "an apologist and a mythologiser" of the violence, [[Blake Morrison]] suggests the poet {{blockquote|has written poems directly about the Troubles as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman, someone looked to for comment and guidance... Yet he has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role, defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical, and questioning the extent to which poetry, however "committed", can influence the course of history.<ref name=poetry_foundation/>
}}

Shaun O'Connell in the ''New Boston Review'' notes that "those who see Seamus Heaney as a symbol of hope in a troubled land are not, of course, wrong to do so, though they may be missing much of the undercutting complexities of his poetry, the backwash of ironies which make him as bleak as he is bright."<ref name=poetry_foundation/> O'Connell notes in his ''Boston Review'' critique of ''[[Station Island (poetry collection)|Station Island]]'':
{{blockquote|Again and again Heaney pulls back from political purposes; despite its emblems of savagery, ''Station Island'' lends no rhetorical comfort to Republicanism. Politic about politics, ''Station Island'' is less about a united Ireland than about a poet seeking religious and aesthetic unity.<ref>{{Cite news |last=O'Connell |first=Shaun |date=1 February 1985 |title=Station Island, Seamus Heaney |url=http://new.bostonreview.net/BR10.1/heaney.html |access-date=2 October 2010 |work=Boston Review}}</ref>}}

Heaney is described by critic [[Terry Eagleton]] as "an enlightened cosmopolitan liberal",<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Eagleton |first=Terry |date=11 November 1999 |title=Terry Eagleton reviews 'Beowulf' translated by Seamus Heaney · ''LRB'' 11 November 1999 |url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n22/terry-eagleton/hasped-and-hooped-and-hirpling |journal=London Review of Books |publisher=Lrb.co.uk |volume=21 |issue=22 |access-date=30 August 2013}}</ref> refusing to be drawn. Eagleton suggests: "When the political is introduced... it is only in the context of what Heaney will or will not say."<ref name="the_guardian_robert_potts_2001">{{Cite news |last=Potts |first=Robert |date=7 April 2001 |title=The view from Olympia |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/07/poetry.tseliotprizeforpoetry2001 |access-date=7 April 2001 |work=The Guardian}}</ref> Reflections on what Heaney identifies as "tribal conflict"<ref name=the_guardian_robert_potts_2001/> favour the description of people's lives and their voices, drawing out the "psychic landscape". His collections often recall the assassinations of his family members and close friends, lynchings and bombings. [[Colm Tóibín]] wrote, "throughout his career there have been poems of simple evocation and description. His refusal to sum up or offer meaning is part of his tact."<ref name=toibin_human_chain/>

Heaney published "Requiem for the [[Croppy|Croppies]]", a poem that commemorates the Irish rebels of 1798, on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 [[Easter Rising]]. He read the poem to both Catholic and Protestant audiences in Ireland. He commented, "To read 'Requiem for the Croppies' wasn't to say 'up the [[Irish Republican Army|IRA]]' or anything. It was silence-breaking rather than rabble-rousing."<ref name="sameer_rahim_70th_birthday_interview">{{Cite news |last=Rahim |first=Sameer |date=11 May 2009 |title=Interview with Seamus Heaney: On the eve of his 70th birthday, Seamus Heaney tells Sameer Rahim about his lifetime in poetry – and who he thinks would make a good poet laureate |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5132022/Interview-with-Seamus-Heaney.html |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220112/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5132022/Interview-with-Seamus-Heaney.html |archive-date=12 January 2022 |access-date=20 November 2010 |work=The Daily Telegraph |location=London}}{{cbignore}}</ref> He stated, "You don't have to love it. You just have to permit it."<ref name=sameer_rahim_70th_birthday_interview/>

He turned down the offer of [[Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom|laureateship of the United Kingdom]], partly for political reasons, commenting, "I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at [[Buckingham Palace|the Palace]] once upon a time."<ref name=sameer_rahim_70th_birthday_interview/> He stated that his "cultural starting point" was "off-centre".<ref name=sameer_rahim_70th_birthday_interview/> A much-quoted statement was when he objected to being included in ''[[The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry]]'' (1982). Although he was born in Northern Ireland, his response to being included in the British anthology was delivered in his poem "An Open Letter":
<poem>
:Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
:My passport's green.
:No glass of ours was ever raised
:To toast The Queen.<ref name=sameer_rahim_70th_birthday_interview/>
</poem>

===Translation===
He was concerned, as a poet and a translator, with the English language as it is spoken in Ireland but also as spoken elsewhere and in other times; he explored [[Old English|Anglo-Saxon]] influences in his work and study. Critic [[W. S. Di Piero]] noted {{blockquote|Whatever the occasion, childhood, farm life, politics and culture in Northern Ireland, other poets past and present, Heaney strikes time and again at the taproot of language, examining its genetic structures, trying to discover how it has served, in all its changes, as a culture bearer, a world to contain imaginations, at once a rhetorical weapon and nutriment of spirit. He writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with received wisdom.<ref name=poetry_foundation/>}} Heaney's first translation was of the Irish lyric poem ''[[Buile Shuibhne|Buile Suibhne]]'', published as ''Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish'' (1984). He took up this character and connection in poems published in ''Station Island'' (1984). Heaney's prize-winning translation of ''[[Beowulf: A New Verse Translation|Beowulf]]'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000, Whitbread Book of the Year Award) was considered groundbreaking in its use of modern language melded with the original Anglo-Saxon "music".<ref name=poetry_foundation/>

===Plays and prose===
His plays include ''The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes'' (1991). Heaney's 2004 play, ''[[The Burial at Thebes]],'' suggests parallels between [[Creon of Thebes|Creon]] and the foreign policies of the [[Presidency of George W. Bush|Bush administration]].<ref>{{Cite news |last=McElroy |first=Steven |date=21 January 2007 |title=The Week Ahead: Jan. 21 – 27 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/arts/21weekahead.html |access-date=21 January 2007 |work=The New York Times}}</ref>

Heaney's engagement with poetry as a necessary engine for cultural and personal change is reflected in his prose works ''The Redress of Poetry'' (1995) and ''[[Finders Keepers (Heaney collection)|Finders Keepers: Selected Prose: 1971–2001]]'' (2001).<ref name=poetry_foundation/>
{{blockquote|"When a poem rhymes," Heaney wrote, "when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit."<ref name=toibin_human_chain/>}}He continues: "The vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place".<ref name=toibin_human_chain/> Often overlooked and underestimated in the direction of his work is his profound poetic debts to and critical engagement with 20th-century Eastern European poets, and in particular Nobel laureate [[Czesław Miłosz]].<ref>Kay, Magdalena. ''In Gratitude for all the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe.'' University of Toronto Press, 2012. {{ISBN|1-4426-4498-2}}</ref>

===Use in the school syllabus===
Heaney's work is used extensively in the school syllabus internationally, including the anthologies ''The Rattle Bag'' (1982) and ''The School Bag'' (1997) (both edited with [[Ted Hughes]]). Originally entitled ''The Faber Book of Verse for Younger People'' on the Faber contract, Hughes and Heaney decided the main purpose of ''The Rattle Bag'' was to offer enjoyment to the reader: "Arbitrary riches." Heaney commented "the book in our heads was something closer to ''The Fancy Free Poetry Supplement''".<ref name=bags_of_enlightenment/> It included work that they would have liked to encounter sooner in their own lives, as well as nonsense rhymes, ballad-type poems, riddles, folk songs and rhythmical jingles. Much familiar canonical work was not included, since they took it for granted that their audience would know the standard fare. Fifteen years later, ''The School Bag'' aimed at something different. The foreword stated that they wanted "less of a carnival, more like a checklist." It included poems in English, Irish, Welsh, Scots and Scots Gaelic, together with work reflecting the African-American experience.<ref name="bags_of_enlightenment">{{Cite news |last=Heaney |first=Seamus |date=25 October 2003 |title=Bags of enlightenment |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/25/poetry.highereducation |access-date=25 October 2003 |work=The Guardian}}</ref> <!--Two of his poems entitled "Storm on the Island" and "Follower" feature on the new [[GCSE]] English Literature course as part of the anthology poetry cluster. His poem "Out of the Bag" is featured in the new [[A-Level]] English Literature course as part of the anthology poetry cluster. REMOVED AS UNCITED-->