The Pen and the Spade: The Poems of Seamus Heaney

Summary

Seamus Heaney was a self-consciously self-made poet. In his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, he gives one of the best accounts available of ‘finding your voice’ as a writer. There were early stirrings of poetry in listening to his mother recite the Latin grammar of her schooldays; the ‘beautiful sprung rhythms’ of the BBC shipping forecast and ‘the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry’ of a Catholic household. He learned to articulate the feelings these induced through reading English poetry at school, and in particular ‘the heavily accented consonantal noise’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in whose ‘staccato’ music Heaney heard an encouraging echo of his own ‘energetic, angular’ Ulster accent. This sage essay was given as a lecture in 1974 to the Royal Society of Literature, less than a decade after Heaney composed the debut that would establish his reputation, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Although early student poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’, there was no long struggle towards maturity and recognition: Heaney arrived fully conscious of what he was about, with a product whose quality was evident straight out of the box. As Chris­topher Ricks shrewdly observed in a contemporary review, ‘you continually catch yourself wanting to apply to the poems themselves their own best formulations.’ Ricks gives the example, from the poem ‘Digging’, of ‘the cool hardness in our hands’ of unearthed potatoes. This, he reflects, ‘is just what we love in the words themselves’. Death of a Naturalist ends with the poet remembering how, as a child, he liked peering into wells, but now ‘I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing’. It was this skilful incorporation of a kind of director’s commentary into his twelve collections that helped to invest readers in the Heaney journey, from 1940s farm childhood to Nobel Prize in 1995. His last book, Human Chain, sold almost sixty thousand copies in the UK and Ireland between publication in 2010 an...