Asked about his astronomical fame in Stepping Stones (2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length collection of interviews, Seamus Heaney quipped, “What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better say everyone is familiar”. But how well do we really know Heaney? By now, his story is the stuff of lore: the rural childhood in County Derry; the grammar school education in the city; the move to Belfast for an undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, then on to Wicklow; posts at Harvard and Oxford; eventually a Nobel prize, and with it global prominence and near-global admiration. To O’Driscoll, Heaney admitted to hoping “that the carriage I’ve learned stood me in good stead when the spotlight turned on me”. Indeed it did. Lauded in his lifetime, since his death in 2013 he has joined the ranks of Ireland’s cultural icons. He is not only one of the most widely read but one of the most widely written about poets in living memory.
In On Seamus Heaney, a slim new volume from Princeton University Press’s Writers on Writers series, R. F. Foster doesn’t seek to radically recast the Heaney narrative, but gives us something of a primer, a “Heaney 101”. In Foster’s own words, the book is an attempt to read Heaney’s work “in the light of the poet’s life and the historical circumstances surrounding it”. While previous books in the series have tended to focus on older historical figures (William Empson, W. H. Auden, Arthur Conan Doyle and Walt Whitman, for instance), On Seamus Heaney is distinguished by Foster’s personal familiarity with his subject. The book is a concise, meticulously researched account of Heaney’s publishing career, drawing on everything from private correspondence to diary entries, early drafts of poems (“The Other Side”, “The Tollund Man”, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”) to newspaper cuttings. As in his landmark, two-volume biography of W. B. Yeats, here Foster couples forensic attention to detail with engaging prose.
Read Full Article »
