New Casebooks SEAMUS HEANEY New Casebooks PUBLISHED FORTHCOMING Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Hamlet Feminism and Shakespeare King Lear Julius Caesar Macbeth The Merchant of Venice A Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing and Shakespeare's History Plays: The Taming of the Shrew Richard II to Henry V Othello Twelfth Night Shakespeare's Problem Plays Shakespeare's Tragedies Feminist Theatre and Theory Waiting for Godot and The Duchess of Malfi and Endgame The White Devil Christopher Marlowe Joseph Conrad David Copperfield and Hard Bleak House Times Wilkie Collins Emma Jane Eyre E. M. Forster Jude the Obscure Frankenstein Mansfield Park and Persuasion Great Expectations Toni Morrison Middlemarch Ulysses Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse John Donne Sense and Sensibility and Philip Larkin Pride and Prejudice Paradise Lost Sons and Lovers Metaphysical Poetry Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tristram Shandy Villette Wuthering Heights William Blake Chaucer Coleridge, Keats and Shelley Seamus Heaney Victorian Women Poets Wordsworth Postcolonial Literatures New Casebooks SEAMUS HEANEY EDITED BY MICHAEL ALLEN St. Martin's Press New York ISBN 978-1-349-10684-4 ISBN 978-1-349-10682-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10682-0 SEAMUS HEANEY Introduction, selection and editorial matter copyright © 1997 by Michael Allen Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-48684-9 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1997 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. ISBN 978-0-312-16502-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-312-16503-1 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seamus Heaney I edited by Michael Allen. p. em.-(New casebooks) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-16502-4 ISBN 978-0-312-16503-1 (pbk.) I. Heaney, Seamus-Criticism and interpetation. 2. Northern Ireland-In literature. I. Allen, Michael. II. Series. PR6058.E2Z874 1997 821'.914-dc20 96-27424 CIP Contents Acknowledgments Vll General Editors' Preface X Introduction: MICHAEL ALLEN 1 1. Growing Up: Review of Death of a Naturalist 21 CHRISTOPHER RICKS 20 A Slow North-east Wind: Review of North 25 CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN 3o 'Inner Emigre' or 'Artful Voyeur'? Seamus Heaney's North 30 EDNA LONGLEY 4o Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold 64 SEAMUS DEANE 50 Representation in Modern Irish Poetry 78 EAMONN HUGHES 6o The Mouth, the Meal and the Book: Review of Field Work 95 CHRISTOPHER RICKS 70 Review of Field Work 102 TERRY EAGLETON 80 Writing a Bare Wire: Station Island 107 NEIL CORCORAN 9 The Government of the Tongue 129 0 SEAMUS HEANEY v VI CONTENTS 10. The Sign of the Cross: Review of The Government of the Tongue 147 THOMAS DOCHERTY 11. 'Pap for the Dispossessed': Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity 155 DAVID LLOYD 12. 'Bog Queens': The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney 185 PATRICIA COUGHLAN 13. Ana-; or Postmodernism, Landscape, Seamus Heaney 206 THOMAS DOCHERTY 14. The Distance Between: Seamus Heaney 223 STAN SMITH 15. Paradigms of Possibility: Seamus Heaney 252 RICHARD KIRKLAND Further Reading 266 Notes on Contributors 271 Index 274 Acknowledgements I am grateful to a considerable number of people for their help in the preparation of this New Casebook: in particular, Maureen Alden, Jim Arnott, Rand Brandes, Michael Durkan, Seamus Heaney, Ivan Herbison, Eamonn Hughes, Richard Kirkland, Christopher Ricks and Michael Smallman. Special thanks are due to Kate Arnott for expertly typing from a fairly illegible script. The Queen's University of Belfast Publications Fund gave welcome financial assistance. I have, with the authors' agreement, shortened two essays repub lished here, those by Terry Eagleton and Patricia Coughlan, in order to exclude material not directly relevant to Heaney's poetry. The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permis sion to use copyright material: Neil Corcoran for material from Seamus Heaney (1986), by per mission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Patricia Coughlan for material from "'Bog Queens": The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney' in Gender in Irish Writing, ed. T. O'Brien Johnson and D. Cairns (1991), by permission of Open University Press; Seamus Deane for 'Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold' in Celtic Revivals (1985), by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Thomas Docherty for 'The Sign of the Cross: Review of The Government of the Tongue', Irish Review, 5, Autumn (1988), 112-16, by permission of the author; and 'Ana-; or Postmodernism, Landscape, Seamus Heaney' in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. T. Docherty (1992), by permission of Harvester Wheatsheaf and Columbia University Press; Terry Eagleton forma terial from 'Recent Poetry: Review of Field Work', Stand Magazine, vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 21:3 (1980) 77-8, by permission of the author; Seamus Heaney for 'The Government of the Tongue' in The Government of the Tongue (1988). Copyright © 1989 by Seamus Heaney, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar Straus & Giroux, Inc.; Eamonn Hughes for material from 'Representation in Modern Irish Poetry' in Aspects of Irish Studies, ed. M. Hill and S. Barber (1990), Institute of Irish Studies, by permission of the author; Richard Kirkland for 'Paradigms of Possibility: Seamus Heaney', in Writing and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1968, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature Series (1994) Longman, by permission of Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd; David Lloyd for "'Pap for the Dispossessed"; Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity' in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (1993), by permission of The Lilliput Press; Edna Longley for mate rial from "'Inner Emigre" or "Artful Voyeur"? Seamus Heaney's North in Poetry in the Wars (1986), by permission of Bloodaxe Books; Conor Cruise O'Brien for 'A Slow North-east Wind: Review of North', The Listener, 25 September 1975, by permission of the author; Christopher Ricks for 'Growing Up: Review of Death of a Naturalist', New Statesman, 27 May 1966, by permission of New Statesman; and 'The Mouth, the Meal and the Book: Review of Field Work', London Review of Books, 1:2, 8 November 1979, by permission of London Review of Books; Stan Smith for 'The Distance Between: Seamus Heaney' in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran (1992), Seren Books, by permission of the author. For copyright material included in the above essays: Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar Straus & Giroux, Inc. for extracts from Seamus Heaney's poetry; selections from Field Work. Copyright © 1976, 1979 by Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern. Copyright © 1987, by Seamus Heaney, Poems 1965-1975. Copyright© 1980 by Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things. Copyright© 1991 by Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems 1966-1987. Copyright© 1990 by Seamus Heaney, Station Island. Copyright © 1975 by Seamus Heaney; and Elizabeth Bishop, 'At the Fishhouses' from The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel; Penguin Books Ltd for Zbigniew Herbert, 'A Knocker' in Selected Poems, trans. Czeslaw Milosz and Pater Dale ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix Scott (1968) Penguin Books. Copyright© Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott 1968. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.