May-June 09:Layout 1 18/03/2009 14:48 Page 36
Seamus Heaney
Celebrates 70 Years
Poetic
Justice
by Eileen Battersby The Irish Times
O
nly a great poet can speak for his spine of steel integrity sustaining this first-
country as well as for himself. Seamus born child of a Co Derry farmer.
Heaney has increasingly fulfilled this
Here is an instinctive writer of immense
role during the course of a career spanning
perception, aware that “my tentative art” as
more than 40 years. In his introduction to
he writes in Casualty (From Field Work,
Sweeney Astray (1983) his version of the old
1979), had led to accusations of evading his
Irish poem Buile Suibhne, he reasoned:
political responsibility. He has never done
“…insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the
this; Heaney, artist of conscience matured
artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by
early poised as he was between two cultures,
his utterance, it is possible to read the work as
contrasting traditions.
an aspect of the creative imagination and the
constraints of religious, political and domes- It was Kavanagh not Yeats who first spoke to
tic obligation.” Heaney could have been writ- him. Even more influential however were
ing about his own artistic dilemma as well as Hopkins and Robert Frost, and well as Ovid
summing up the central question facing all and Dante. If there is a defining clue to the
literature. For all the beauty and the delicacy art of Seamus Heaney it is his soaring linguis-
of memory-based lyrics crafted by a poet who tic versatility; his response to language, the
has never lost his capacity for wonder in the formal and the traditional, the intimate and
ordinary small miracles of life, there is also a most emphatically, the colloquial rhythms of
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