In a recent National Survey Seamus Heaney has been named as one of the top 100 living geniuses. He is joint 26th, alongside Steven Spielberg, Hiroshi Ishiguro, (the Japanese Robotist!), and Robert Edwards, pioneer of IVF.
Seamus Heaney. The one we all learn about in school. As ubiquitous as Guinness in an Irish themed bar, anointed representative of the establishment, palatable to them, yet somehow standing in utter defiance of what they represent. He once wrote these lines to explain his objection to his inclusion in the 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast the Queen.’
He gets away with it. Political without being extreme, subtly subversive, he is ‘the greatest Irish poet since Yeats’, his greatness, finally and ceremoniously ratified by the Noble Prize in 1995. But it was not always so. Born of humble beginnings on a farm in Mossbawn, County Derry, the eldest of nine children, Heaney was not naturally destined to lecture at Oxford, he was destined to do as all his forefathers had done, work the soil. Because of this, his decision to pursue poetry as an occupation was a difficult one for him. It took a long time for him to feel morally comfortable with his choice and in the midst of this internal conflict, the pressure was on to hone his craft. As he told the Telegraph in a rare interview earlier this year:
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
That he can be strangely dismissive of his own early work is something I find disconcerting. Because it is his early work that is for me not only the most accessible, but is also the most encouraging for a young writer to study. Even Heaney had to search for his style.
‘The Tollund Man’ (1972) is one of my favourites. The real Tollund man is a perfectly preserved corpse discovered in bogland in Denmark in 1950. The victim of a human sacrifice to the fertility goddesses sometime in the 4th century, the Tollund Man is so well preserved that scientists have been able to tell the corpse’s last meal from the contents of its two and a half thousand year old stomach.
It is a combination of the grotesque nature of the killing, and the pathos evoked by the dead man’s stasis within the noble mire that Heaney captures so well. The body is dyed brown by the ‘dark juices’ of her, (the fertility goddess), the eyes are mild peas, the body naked except for a small skull cap and a belt. The noose, the method of excecution, still visible around the neck.
Heaney’s empathy comes from his own knowledge of the boglands, from his own experience of sacrificing oneself to the earth, the power of ritual over self-interest. Heaney purposely writes that he will go to Aarhus to see the Tollund Man even though he knows that he is on display in Silkeborg. But in Heaney’s opinion "Aarhus" goes better with the metrical feet.
In a brave move, he poured his concerns into his work. There’s nothing disingenuous in that. Seamus Heaney’s greatness, for me, is not simply rooted in his achievements in the field of poetry, but in his achievements period. He managed to do what Thomas Hardy’s Jude aspires to do but never quite manages, to make it from the peasantry to academia in one generation. To come as far as Heaney has come, and to reach the very top of one’s chosen field is a staggering accomplishment on its own, but to do it in such a short space of time is simply amazing. All the more rare in these days of enforced tertiary education, and the broadening of the middle class.
If one were to define Irishness, the theme of struggle quickly becomes apparent. Seamus Heaney made a physical and intellectual leap from the working man’s life, to the life of an artist and a thinker, and the effort towards the reconciliation of the two parts of that dichotomy is what defines his early work and his sense of identity. I know what that’s like.