Seamus Heaney's Poems

Introduction

Seamus Heaney’s Poems is a monumental undertaking. Comprising 684pp of poems and 533pp of notes this is the definitive edition of Heaney’s poetry and stands alongside Stepping Stones (2008), his autobiography; The Translations (2022); and The Letters (2023), as well as his essays and lectures Preoccupations (1980); The Government of the Tongue (1988); and The Redress of Poetry (1995).

I think in time an edition of his Essays will come, and this too will be monumental and will encompass far more than the published volumes - there are a great many uncollected essays, and as the most interviewed of poets his publishers will need to decide whether to include the interviews in a separate volume, or to include these as essays also. Personally, I think the two should be published separately, but then I am not in position to decide this.

I have loved Heaney’s work ever since reading North as a teenager in the mid-70s. My mother’s family came from the same kind of rural Ulster community Heaney was himself brought up in and reading each collection in turn, his essays, and his autobiography, was like receiving letters from my beloved cousins. Here was - to quote Ezra Pound - news that stayed news, the authentic ring of literature-in-the-making, and so I have decided to do that most Joycean of things, devote my life to his work. Or at least that part of my life that is left to me!

I intend to post up a daily reflection or commentary of my own on Heaney’s poems, taking each one in turn. His Poems begins with 19 uncollected poems published during the years 1959 - 1966. Heaney was an undergraduate at Queen’s University Belfast from 1957 - 1961, graduating with First Class Honours in English Language and Literature, and joined Philip Hobsbaum’s Belfast Group in 1962.

Hobsbaum was a Lecturer who’d come over to Belfast from Sheffield where he’d been studying for a PhD under William Empson. He’d helped to run the London Group, a poets’ workshop whose members included Peter Porter and Edward Lucie-Smith, and his arrival at QUB marked a distinct stroke of luck for the newly-graduated Heaney, as we shall see.

But for now it’s time to have a look at the first poem published in Poems.