Adieu Heaney

Seamus Heaney, the internationally recognized as the greatest Irish poet since W.B. Yeats, left this mortal world on 30^th August 2013. Like Yeats, he won the Nobel Prize for literature and, like Yeats, his reputation and influence spread far beyond literary circles. He was a translator, broadcaster and prose writer of distinction, but his poetry was his most remarkable achievement, for its range, its consistent quality and its impact on readers: Love poems, epic poems, poems about memory and the past, poems about conflict and civil strife, poems about the natural world, poems addressed to friends, poems that found significance in the everyday or delighted in the possibilities of the English language.

It is true that in the work of any creative artist the influence of milieu can be felt because his sensibility is the outcome of the perceptions from his society. So, the society plays a pivotal role in the life of an artist. Central to the social life is the family. Family is the matrix where the influence on an artist’s life, soul and work are first. These observations are truer about Heaney than any other. Heaney was also conscious of the largeness of spirit passed on to him by his parents, and the richness of experience which found and sustained him. He was aware of this fact and acknowledged it in his poems by drawing heavily on the memories, associations and knowledge of the world he knew so well.  Born on 13 April, 1939 to Patrick Heaney and Margaret Cathleen McCann on a family farm in the rural heart of County Londonderry, he never forgot the world he came from. He recalled in ‘Personal Helicon’:

 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. 

In year 1965, his first collection of poems Eleven Poems was published by Faber and Faber and many more successful ventures followed.  He won many prestigious awards: The Somerset Maughum Award for Death of a Naturalist in 1976, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in 1975, the W.H.Smith Award for North in 1976, the Whitbread Award for The Haw Lantern, the Sunday Times Award for excellence in writing in 1988 and the greatest of them all – the Noble Prize in 1995, "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past", in the words of the Nobel citation. These awards and honours conferred upon him speak volumes about success and popularity as a poet.    

In his early collections, Heaney has written about country crafts thatching, butter-churning, and forging. There is a homely, unassuming and reassuring feel to the poetry. It is rooted in rural experience; it celebrates family traditions of silent rural toil and the sturdy strength and restrained speech of labourers and craftsmen. Many readers believe that these country poems are the best.

Heaney was most sensuous poet in English since Keats. His Keatsian sensuousness, his gift for creating the physical actuality of the external world, his trust in the magic of onomatopoeia and the force of simple visual imagery quickly won him many admirers. His readers noticed that the feel of thing comes vividly into his poems that they seem to be written in something thicker than language.

Heaney was a Roman Catholic- a community which was in minority in Ireland and which was considered inferior to the Protestants and English Cultures. The injustices towards Catholics and the politics of polarization exerted pressure on him and forced him to adopt a Catholic stance. Bound by the ‘stigma of heredity’, for a long time he kept faith with his community by imbibing their most characteristic quality- their speechlessness. But he found that their speechlessness is the root cause of their troubles, he threw off the gag of the place; he struggled for a long time to restrain his feelings of race and resentment. When he spoke he was branded by a Belfast newspaper, ‘a well known Papist Propagandist’. He defined himself as a Catholic writer, and wanted to stress the cultural rather than the religious load implicit in that term. He believed that the Catholics and the Protestants might one day learn to accept each other’s culture and tradition and acknowledge the rich diversity. He was right because, by slow degrees, the clash of two seemingly irreconcilable religious and cultural ideologies changed into a colonial struggle between the natives and the invaders. The invaders invaded not only their land but also their language.

           Heaney found the pre Christian mythic material which enabled him to confront and interpret the slaughter of innocence from a mythical and historical perspective and thus provided him with an aesthetic and to release the reader’s mind from the immediacy of experience so that he could restore a sense of the universality of human life. Had he been emotionally involved with his personal troubles he would have become a minor poet. But distancing himself, widening his themes, breaking into new modes and learning to trust his feelings, Heaney became the best poet since Yeats.

He does not endorse Auden’s view that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, but he believes that ‘poetry is its own special action and that having its own mode of consciousness, its own mode of reality, has its own efficacy gradually’. Like Auden he thinks that poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but extending knowledge of good and evil and leaves it to them to make a rational choice.

In the creative career of six decades, he produced a plethora of works of extraordinary distinctiveness and distinction and became a poet rated highly by critics and academicians yet popular with the common readers. It was Heaney who brought revival of interest in the verse form of Anglo-Saxon poetry. His work had both a meditative lyricism and an airy velocity. His lines could embody a dark, marshy melancholy, but as often as not they also communicated the wild onrushing joy of being alive. Heaney will remain one of the most widely read poets in the world.