Deep, still, seeable. Seamus Heaney's letters.

The music of what happens and the bundle of incoherence.

The poet of vision

Seamus Heaney found meaning in all things. He characterised poetry as digging into the emotional life of the individual and their society. In “Feeling Into Words”, he talked of “poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself.” In a letter, he wrote that the poet “is drawn to redress the balance of circumstances by the weight of the imagination”. His work has mythic qualities, moving from the personal to the cultural, the political. As he said in “Squarings, iii”, Heaney “squinted out from a skylight of the world.” His poetry works to resolve that personal squinted vision with the wider world. The resolution is art.

Through his career, from Death of a Naturalist to Human Chain, birdsong is a symbol of that art. In “Saint Francis and the Birds” Heaney writes the birds “for sheer joy/ played and sang.” Heaney wrote elegies and dark verses, too, but the spirit of his writing was always preservatory, reclamatory, harmonizing, balanced. Part of the power of his work was that it kept what Richard Wilbur once called a “difficult balance” without denying the reality of life in Ireland, and in Northern Ireland especially during the Troubles. His vision was broader than that.

As a poet of vision in troubled political times, therefore, he was trying to have us look beyond the Troubles, to the idea of a solution, to the beauty of the world, to hope. Famously, in 1990, he wrote,

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.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Heaney was often at his best when this sort of public poetry commingled with his personal verse. He could start with a memory of his agrarian childhood and end with a broad political ideal, as he did in “Mint”,

My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

Heaney was a poet of regarding things. And regarding is always highly personal.

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Deep, still, seeable

Heaney’s immense and earned popularity was the result of this poetic persona: famous Seamus was the gentle, insistent, nostalgic, shy, cheerful, realistic figure who constantly emerged from the poems. From the farm boy who watched kittens drown to the honeymooner running through the Underground to the family man playing Scrabble in his cottage to the old poet reviewing a family photo album, Heaney was loved for his ability to turn himself into public art. Many of his most loved poems feature him or his relatives: he is especially touching when writing about his memories of his mother and aunt. The title poem of his most significant collection Seeing Things is about three memories: a boating trip he took as a child, the facade of a cathedral, and a farming accident that nearly killed his father. The “deep, still, seeable-down-into-water” of “Seeing Things” is immediately reminiscent of the final poem in Death of a Naturalist, “Personal Helicon”, which is about Heaney’s childhood habit of looking down into wells.

Though he is so personal, Heaney always turns his experience into something bigger. The poems try to become, and often do become, what he called “that moment when the bird sings very close/ To the music of what happens.” To hear the music of what happens, Heaney must catch the world, as he said in Seeing Things, when it is “deep, still, seeable.”

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The bundle of accident and incoherence

What happened—what actually happened—in Heaney’s own life, therefore remains a large and enticing question. Heaney often quoted Yeats saying, “Even when the poet seems most himself… he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” Heaney’s own bundle, and how it was reborn in his work, is now partially revealed in his letters, edited by Christopher Reid.

Many readers will find a new Seamus Heaney here: wittier and sharper, lighter and more bantering, but also a man capable of deeper indolence and melancholy. This is the Seamus Heaney who tells rude jokes with old school friends, states that he cannot bring himself to believe in any of the thousands of poets in Berkeley in the 1970s, and tells friends about the days spent in “a torpor of aspiration without action.” In one letter he writes, “I have an immense gift for indolence, snoring like a bog-eel.”

A good collection of letters brings a fresh new view of a person, revealing the multitudes of their bundle of accident. Heaney often comes through in this way. Here he is, in 1971, writing to a friend about his experiences teaching writing classes in Berkley.

I am hellish busy here and will be until August 5. I’ve taken on a Summer Course so that our fares will be easier; and now I’m three weeks into the summer or rather spring quarter, teaching ‘An Introduction to Modern British and American Literature’ and a writing class with 42 people! Disastrous for the ego of most of them, stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible, assholes (assholes or cunts, I hear you cry). Seriously though, it is an exhausting assignment, with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.

Here we have a mischievous, bantering Heaney, capable of curtly humorous language, but also a frayed, irritable, possibly impatient temperament. At bottom, this passage shows his devotion to poetry, to art first. (He said elsewhere, there were thousands of poets in the Bay area at that time, and very little of their work survived.) One pleasure of these letters is that even written hurriedly or in heat, sometimes especially then, they have the firm lilt of Heaney’s ear: notice the fine rhythm of that line “assholes (assholes or cunts, I hear you cry).” It’s not the only time such words appear. Writing to apologise for his slowness in delivering some work, he says that his friend Seamus Deane must have relegated him to “the academy of the cunts.” In one letter he passes on a joke from his children. Did you hear about the short sighted castrator? He got the sack. These are the moments when something of the self that doesn’t come through in the poetry is seen. Moments of resistance, despair, crudity. A sense of Heaney not as a public poet, but a private man.

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Re-tuning the world

In his Nobel lecture, Heaney said “credit is due to [poetry], in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.” The first sort of truth to life is “a concrete reliability… an upfront representation of the world it stood in for.” Heaney found this in many poets: Hopkins, Bishop, Chaucer, Keats, and Frost.

But he later appreciated other poets—poets like Stevens, Eliot, Rilke, Dickinson, poets of “forked lightnings and fissures of association… visionary strangeness”. The strangeness of his times, the horrors of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, led Heaney to a new vision of poetry, not just as concrete representation:

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.

This balance meant poetry had to be “true to the impact of external reality and… sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being.” As he said in The Redress of Poetry, following Wallace Stevens, the nobility of poetry is “the imagination pressing back against reality.”

Heaney’s early poem about the nature of poetry, “Personal Helicon”, emphasises the personal, inward nature of his writing: “I rhyme/ To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” That poem was influenced by Frost’s sonnet “For Once, Then, Something.” Heaney sometimes underplays Frost as an influence. In a letter to then PhD student Rachel Buxton, detailing which Frost poems affected him, Heaney mentioned “Out, Out—”, “Home Burial”, “The Fear”, “The Code”. And he says, “I don’t think his trace is audible in any obvious way in my work.” Heaney either forgot or denied the remarkable influence Frost had on “Personal Helicon”. (Poems in this footnote.)¹

There are some obvious parallel details: the light and dark, the deepness, the white images, the ferns, Narcissus (who Frost implies and Heaney brings in directly). Even the line “gave you back your own call” is an echo of Frost’s poem “The Most of It”. But Heaney is also getting beyond Frost. Frost is writing about poetry seeing through appearances to the truth of things. As he wrote in “Mowing”, “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows”. Heaney is not just writing about the fact, but about the inner life, the imagination. Frost is a poet of the world; his influence on Heaney was strong enough that Heaney sought consciously to avoid and sometimes forget it; but it is clear from this comparison; Heaney took the example of Frost and fortified it with the imagination pressing back against reality.

He wasn’t just writing to capture the music of the world, but to retune it.

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No rootless flower but the speech of a man

Always a poet of balances, then, Heaney was both a highly personal and highly private writer. These letters show him feeling like “perished elastic”, giving unsolicited advice to Andrew Motion when he became Poet Laureate to “link your own personal matter to an occasion”, lamenting that he is growing old and won’t see many more springs, offering generous and sometimes rather pompous appraisals of friends’ poetry collections. He works incredibly hard. He lives between the silence of poetry and the clatter of correspondence. Unlike someone like Philip Larkin, he does not seem hugely different when writing to different people. But that is probably a result of how the letters were selected.

A revealing volume, then, but perhaps not revealing enough. Heaney’s poems are often set in times and places, and are about people, that meant the most to him. But he abhorred the idea of intrusion. When the scholar Michael Parker was writing a book about Heaney, which was becoming more biographical than critical, Heaney wrote to him it would be a robbery of the intimate and precious parts of his life. That difficult balance has been kept in this selection of the letters, which omit everything he wrote to his wife and children, and includes nothing before 1964, when Heaney was twenty-five.

Heaney’s wife, Marie, and his three children, Michael, Christopher, and Catherine, co-operated with the editor of this volume, the poet Christopher Reid. But, they made clear to him that “their privacy was inviolable.” At some point, this has to change. Heaney must have a full biography. He is too important a writer not to be revealed in all his parts. In his essay “Yeats as an Example”, Heaney quoted Yeats,

A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather, the better his poetry, the more sincere his life. His life is an experiment in living and those that come after have the right to know it. Above all, it is necessary that the lyric poet’s life be known that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man. To achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one’s own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it… to give one’s own life as well as one’s words (which are so much nearer one’s soul) to the criticism of the world

Let us hope that Fintan O’Toole’s official biography of Heaney will be done under the auspices of the idea that we have a right to know the life of so important a writer, and that this will mean invading privacies neither Heaney nor his family wanted to reveal. There are hints of the other side of Heaney in his poems—such as in Seeing Things, when he described himself as “flailing round the house like a man berserk”—but it seems unlikely that a full biography would reveal him to be a monster, a new Carlyle.

Until we get that total revelation, though, these letters will seem to be as much an exercise in reputation management as they are a revealing of a great poet. Christopher Reid has done splendid work, as one would expect, and as he did with Ted Hughes, but it is notable just how tightly the Hughes estate has retained control, not allowing Jonathan Bate to quote from Hughes’ work at all in his biography.

He once wrote to Ted Hughes that Birthday Letters commingled the quotidian and the sacred. What actually happened in Hughes’ life, Heaney said, “had gone round the dark of the mind’s moon and come back beyond me as poetry.” These letters give us some sense of the dark side of Heaney’s mind’s moon, but not enough. It is notable that the Heaney estate follows the pattern of the Hughes letters. They should not do so with the biography.

As Heaney said, “The way we are living,/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.” That’s how we need to see him next: all of him, timorous and bold. Deep, still, seeable.

1. Here they are, for comparison.

First, Frost.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

Now, Heaney.

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.