Seamus Heaney: voice of a generation
As Seamus Heaney celebrates his 70th birthday, Matthew McCreary looks at how a young man from Co Londonderry has become one of the world's greatest living literary figures
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Eevery generation, it seems, has a voice, be it expressed through music, prose or poetry. For many Irish people that voice has belonged for over 40 years to Seamus Heaney.
Since first coming to prominence in the early 1960s, Heaney has been a part of that great Irish tradition of storytelling.
From an early stage his subjects have been the everyday observations borne of a simple upbringing in rural Co Londonderry, perhaps most poignantly put to verse in his seminal poem Digging, as the turf lug used by generations of menfolk before him becomes the "squat pen" resting between his finger and thumb.
Likewise, under his gaze boyish games of football or forays into gathering frogspawn become suffused with deeper meaning.
It is a long way from the flicker of candle and paraffin light in a Co Londonderry farmhouse to the spotlights of the world stage.
Yet even as he accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 he spoke at great length of his childhood years, "emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world".
"It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other," he said.
This intimacy and companionship with his family, friends and neighbours gave him an early understanding of human beings and his countrymen which has since characterised so much of his work.
In another time the talents of a country-born poet, especially one from deepest, darkest Ulster, might have gone no further than a parish newsheet. It was at Queen's University Belfast where he became part of a wider circle of talented poets which would include Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson.
The arrival of the Troubles in the late 1960s gave another impetus to his work. Having grown up listening to reports of the Second World War on his family wireless, Heaney was now able to articulate first hand the thoughts and feelings of many people in Northern Ireland at that time.
Having studied Latin, Irish and Anglo-Saxon, his love of ancient languages also tapped into a deeper appreciation of how history shapes us. His fascination with the past has seen some notable additions to his canon of work, notably his translation of Beowulf and reworkings of ancient classics by Greek tragedian Sophocles.
It is one of these plays, The Cure at Troy, that provided one of his most memorable lines: "History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.'"
Analysing Heaney's contribution to the arts in Ireland is akin to examining the influence of the Pope on Catholicism. One cannot understate the colossal figurehead he has become to fellow poets and writers in Ireland. Yet it is his contribution to the ordinary Irishman, from whatever part of the island, which has set him apart from many other poets of his generation.
His diverse and deep body of work is eminently accessible while still maintaining an intellectual integrity.
His work can boast the scope of poetic achievement, from technical mastery of the English language to a deep understanding of the meaning of words and themes. His grasp of the elements of human nature, its loves and losses and its strengths and frailties has given him a voice which has deepened with each year.
It is this lack of loftiness and honesty of spirit and purpose which has ensured his place in the canon of great world writers.
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