Seamus Heaney

## Biography

“Be advised, my passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised /To toast the Queen” (Heaney,1983)

**Seamus Heaney**, in full **Seamus Justin Heaney**, (born April 13, 1939, near Castledàwson, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland—died August 30, 2013, Dublin, Ireland), Irish poet whose work is notable for its evocation of Irish rural life and events in Irish history as well as for its allusions to Irish myth. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

After graduating from Queen’s University, Belfast (B.A., 1961), Heaney taught secondary school for a year and then lectured in colleges and universities in Belfast and Dublin. He became a member of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, soon after its founding by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. In 1982 he joined the faculty of Harvard University as visiting professor and, in 1985, became full professor—a post he retained while teaching at the University of Oxford (1989–94).

Heaney’s first poetry collection was the prizewinning *Death of a Naturalist* (1966). In this book and *Door into the Dark* (1969), he wrote in a traditional style about a passing way of life—that of domestic rural life in Northern Ireland. In *Wintering Out* (1972) and *North* (1975), he began to encompass such subjects as the violence in Northern Ireland and contemporary Irish experience, though he continued to view his subjects through a mythic and mystical filter.

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### Ireland in the 1960s and beyond

The 1960s changed Irish culture, often painfully. In literary terms, the government censorship of the preceding 30 years began to be challenged in a more sustained fashion. In 1960 Edna O’Brien published *The Country Girls*, the first novel in a trilogy that helped open up discussion of the role of women and sex in Irish society and of Roman Catholicism’s oppressive force upon women. The novel was banned, and O’Brien left Ireland shortly thereafter. John McGahern too had his early work banned, but he continued to produce novels that subtly probed the changes rapidly transforming Ireland. *Amongst Women* (1990) is his most critically acclaimed and moving novel.

In a number of novels published in the late 1980s and ’90s, it seemed that Irish writers for the first time were finally able to explore the political and cultural transformations their country had undergone in the previous 60 years. Among these, the work of Patrick McCabe, in particular *The Butcher Boy* (1992) and *The Dead School* (1995), stands out. So too does that of John Banville, among Ireland’s preeminent novelists at the end of the 20th century. His extraordinary novel *Birchwood* (1973) is a postmodern, post-Joycean revisitation of the Big House novel, a genre that has endured throughout modern Irish fiction.

But the main cultural and political crisis in Ireland in the 1960s and beyond was the explosion of the “Troubles,” a term used to describe the violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. This violence was accompanied by a necessarily urgent literary reaction—some 800 Troubles-related novels, for instance, had been published by the early 21st century—and there began in Northern Ireland an extraordinary poetic flowering. The American-born John Montague initiated this process with the long poem *The Rough Field* (1972), a milestone in contemporary Irish poetry, but his reputation was soon eclipsed by the arrival of Seamus Heaney, who in 1995 became Ireland’s fourth winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney’s lyrical, muscular, aural poetry, like Montague’s, delved into the Irish past and into what Heaney called the “word-hoard” of the Irish landscape. His frequent use of traditional forms (as in his sonnet sequences) produced a body of work as accessible and beautiful as it is demanding.

The Troubles yielded other literary and cultural engagements that shaped the ways in which Irish literature as a whole is now understood. The Field Day Theatre Company, founded in 1980 in Londonderry(Derry) by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea, instigated a new movement both in drama and in cultural politics that sought to undo some of the damage done by partition to modern Irish self-perception and self-representation.

### Literary Reaction

**Background**

* Government censorship of Irish tradition and language
* The troubles
* Crisis in Ireland

**Reaction**

* The Field Day Theatre Company was created by Brian Friel in 1980  by Edna O'Brien  - John McGahern  - Patrick McCabe - John Banville - John Montague - Seamus Heaney
* Works : mainly Drama
* Theme: The damage done by Ireland partition

## Bibliography

* 1966- Death of a Naturalist
* 1969- Door into the Dark
* 1972- Wintering Out
* 1975- Stations
* 1975- North
* 1979- Field Word
* 1984- Station Island
* 1987- The Haw Lantern
* 1991- Seeing Things
* 1996- The Spirit Level
* 2001- Electric Light
* 2006- District and Circle
* 2010- Human Chain

### Literary Style

“I was symbolically set down between the traces of English influence and the pull of the local world of experience, between 'the manor' and 'the morass” (Heaney, 1998)

“the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving a satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament”(Heaney ,1990)

“Heaney developed a **completely unique style that subtly refers to all times and places, and in which a fascinating game is played with contradictions and paradoxes. His tone is usually mild and serene, making the existential themes he broaches all the more intense”** (Jan Baeke,2012)

“The **form** of the poem," said Heaney, "is **crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it**, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being”(Heaney,1995)

* Popupal for his Irishness
* Poetry of international importance
* Works: Poetry - Playwright - Essay - Translation
* Themes: Evocation of Irish rural life, Irish history and tradition, Irish Myth, contemporary concerns (Punishment, 1975), family legacy,

**Form/Structure:**

* Musical language
* Rich and vivid imagery
* Multi-sensory details
* Self – Reflective mode
* Traditional forms (sonnet)

## Digging

Digging" is one of the most widely known poems by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney and serves as the opening poem of Heaney's debut 1966 poetry collection, *Death of a Naturalist*. It begins with the speaker hovering over a blank page with a pen, preparing to write. The speaker then reflects on the work ethic and skill of his father and grandfather, both of whom worked the land as farmers. Though the speaker is breaking with that *specific* familial tradition, the speaker presents writing as its own kind of labor, with speaker vowing to "dig" with the pen.

Self - Referential (recalling memories of his family labour and tradition) but at the same time highling Irish legacy and tradition in general.

* Book : *Death of a Naturalist* (1966)
* Form: Free Verse – 8 Stanza poem
* Simple Diction
* Internal Rhyme
* Tone: Reflective
* Themes: Family tradition and pride – Irish tradition – Search of identity
* Setting: Irish peat moss

### Poem

 **Refrain:** | “Between my finger and my thumb”(1, 29)

1. Between my finger and my thumb

2. The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

3. Under my window, a clean rasping sound

4. When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

5. My father, digging. I look down

6. Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

7. Bends low, comes up twenty years away

8. Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

9. Where he was digging.

10. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

11. Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

12. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

13. To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

14. Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

15. By God, the old man could handle a spade.

16. Just like his old man.

17. My grandfather cut more turf in a day

18. Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

19. Once I carried him milk in a bottle

20. Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

21. To drink it, then fell to right away

22. Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

23. Over his shoulder, going down and down

24. For the good turf. Digging.

25. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

26. Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

27. Through living roots awaken in my head.

28. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

29. Between my finger and my thumb

30. The squat pen rests.

31. I’ll dig with it.

## Intro Paragraph

In Northern Ireland, the 1960s saw the culmination of violent religious and social struggles brewing since the Irish wars for Independence, dating back decades prior. While Unitarian Protestants argued in favor of their countries’ permanence within the United Kingdom, Republican Catholics expressed their desire to become part of the recently established Republic of Ireland. In the midst of this bloody conflict, Irish writers began to reflect on the importance of portraying their pride for national cultural traits into their pieces. This was the case of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), an Irish poet and professor raised by Catholic farmers in rural County Derry. Heaney often described with fine detail the beauty of the pastoral landscape, charging his verses with a sense of satisfaction as regards to his roots. One of Heaney’s most popular pieces is “Digging” (1966), the first poem in his 1966 compilation *The Death of a Naturalist*. In “Digging”, Heaney explores the persistence of Irish traditions and the ideas of personal and community identity. This free verse poem is filled with imagery that allows the reader to be captivated by the rural scenery and also invites, throughout its symbolism, to reflect on the individual contributions to one’s traditions.

### MLA citation

Heaney, Seamus. "Digging." *Death of a Naturalist*, 1966. Faber and Faber, 1991. pp. 13-14.

## Sources

“Seamus Heaney: Irish Poet, Critic & Playwright: Nobel Prize”

< http://www.seamusheaney.org/>

“Seamus Heaney, Digging with the Pen” Harvard Magazine. Nov-Dec 2006.

< http://harvardmagazine.com/2006/11/seamus-heaney- digging- wi.html >

“The Nobel Prize in Literature 1995”. Nobelprize.org. The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize. 29 May 2011.

   < http://nobelprize.org/nobel\_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/>