When Seamus Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a friend of mine sent him some poems for comment. They were returned with a courteous note advising him to “keep your eye clear, your heart strong, your whole writing self braced and unbreathy.” My friend’s pleasure at this encouragement was somewhat diminished when, long afterwards, he heard Heaney say in an interview that that was his standard response when people sent him bad poems. Yet when one reads, in Christopher Reid’s edition of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, the sort of thing Heaney wrote to people whose poems he actually liked, one feels my friend had the best of it.¹ Ted Hughes is told that his collection Wolfwatching is “both plasm-tender and heart-sure”; Medbh McGuckian’s Marconi’s Cottage is “cloudy with mist all round it, but is pebbly-hard and watery-clear behind that gratifying aura”; in Gibbons Ruark’s Rescue the Perishing Heaney found “the outer and inner delicacies and distances so finely matched”; Derek Mahon’s The Yellow Book displayed “opulence of means and melody . . . buoyancy in the verse and balance in the feeling.” To which, Reid tells us, Mahon appended a note: “Pompous ass.”

Such Jamesian locutions form a marked contrast with the precision, accuracy, and felicity with which Heaney wrote about poems in his published criticism. The essays in Preoccupations (1980), The Government of the Tongue (1988), and his Oxford lectures The Redress of Poetry (1995) repeatedly impress by their combination of analysis that never becomes pedantic with generalization that never becomes vacuous. R. F. Foster, in On Seamus Heaney (2020)—an ideal introduction to his work—praises the “expansiveness and enthusiasm” of his criticism, the “glancing but absolute exactness of his language.” That same balance of observation and reflection is found in his best poems as well.

There are few asperities and a healthy dash of self-mockery.

A decade after Heaney’s death in 2013, his publishers at Faber (in the United Kingdom) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (in the United States, working a year or so behind Faber) have launched a number of ambitious projects. The volumes under review here—The Letters and The Translations of Seamus Heaney—will be followed by Bernard O’Donoghue’s edition of the collected poems and a biography by Fintan O’Toole. Heaney’s interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones (2008), have already provided invaluable insights into his life and work. Despite occupying about as many pages as a Dickens or George Eliot novel, the letters still only constitute a selection; the earliest item dates from 1964, when Heaney was already twenty-five, and more intimate letters have been omitted at the request of the family. Consequently, personal revelations are few. What we have is largely professional and social correspondence, often dashed off, with apologies for neglect or late replies, while in transit between readings and the increasingly stressful public duties demanded of a Nobel laureate who felt he had become “too much the mascot” and “a kind of product.” Heaney’s temperament emerges as it does in his published interviews and media appearances: warm, mischievous, generous, and sensitive. There are few asperities and a healthy dash of self-mockery. Some of the letters are in light verse, the most brilliant example being one to Robert Crawford (March 1996) to commemorate the bicentenary of Robert Burns, in which Heaney uses a Burns stanza form with dazzling skill, contriving to provide a critical appreciation which is also a comic tour de force.

Letters from Berkeley, where Heaney was a visiting lecturer at the University of California in 1970–71, reflect his excitement at discovering a social scene very different (“new suits and haircuts have about as much chance here as a snowball in hell”) from that in Ireland. He immersed himself in contemporary American poetry, impressed by its experimental boldness of form and tone, but, as he reported to O’Driscoll, he “couldn’t slip the halter of the verse line and the stanza” in his own work (greater flexibility was to come later). He was struck by the intensity of the anti-Vietnam movement and by the lack of self-doubt in the protesters: “I couldn’t imagine a poetry reading in Belfast directed simply and solely against the Troubles. The poets and the audience [in Ireland] were too clued-in to the complexity . . .” That is a characteristic reaction. Heaney’s resistance to demands for him to make political statements is well-known to his readers (and was bitterly resented by those, friends and colleagues among them, who accused him of equivocation). So it is intriguing to find him writing in 1973 to Brendan Hamill, a former pupil of his during his years as a schoolteacher, that in his early work he was not “very politically conscious as a poet” (original italics); that, even as violence increased in Northern Ireland, he “tried to be non-partisan and to comprehend all that was happening within the terms of history or myth”; and that, though his response may have been oblique, “the voice can’t be summoned ” (original italics).

There has always been a political dimension to Heaney’s work

In fact, as Foster’s monograph makes clear, there has always been a political dimension to Heaney’s work. Given the time and place of his birth and growing up, it could hardly be otherwise. But “politics” has to be taken in its original sense, as the question of what makes a community. At times, it’s true, Heaney felt the need to be more explicit. His letter of March 31, 1983, to Blake Morrison, who had included Heaney in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry which he had edited with Andrew Motion, enclosed a poem (later published) protesting politely but firmly against being categorized as “British”: “My passport’s green./ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast The Queen” (original italics). His political interventions were usually more indirect, such as the poem “Anything Can Happen” (2001), a version of an ode by Horace that is also a response to 9/11, or The Burial at Thebes (2004), his adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, which reflects the climate of President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.”

Letters to Charles Monteith, the poetry editor of Faber, in 1972 show that Heaney planned a book on “the idea of an Irish poetic tradition,” which, in the event, came to nothing. But that tradition was always dear to him: Sweeney Astray (2001) is his abridged translation of the twelfth-century Middle Irish Buile Suibhne, and he devoted essays to Brian Merriman, W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, John Hewitt, and Oscar Wilde. His letters to Tom Paulin, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Medbh McGuckian remind us that he belonged to a remarkable constellation of Irish poets coming to prominence during the 1950s and 1960s. Heaney spoke eloquently about his Irishness in a lecture, “Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times; the Irish Poet and Britain,” printed in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (2002). Here he suggested that the word “Britannic,” which “allows equal status on the island of Britain to Celt and Saxon, to Scoti and Cymri, to Maldon and Tintagel, to Beowulf and the Gododdin,” might be a more acceptable alternative to “British”; and he added that the concept of the “through-other,” an Ulster word meaning “physically untidy or mentally confused,” was applicable to the “Britannic.” The sectarian violence in Northern Ireland figured in his poetry in various guises, the best known being the “bog poems” in North (1975), which find an analogy to the Irish situation in the murder victims of Iron Age Jutland whose bodies had been preserved in peat. Translation, which was a significant part of Heaney’s output, is also a “through-other” activity, a trafficking between languages and cultures.

Heaney is both translator and translatee. Reid’s volume includes letters to his French, Italian, and Russian translators, and he has also appeared in Catalan, Finnish, modern Greek, and Spanish. His own translations, collected in Marco Sonzogni’s edition, remind us that, while never losing touch with his Irish roots, he commanded a European range of reference.² His major book-length achievements include Beowulf (1999), Henryson’s The Testament of Cressid & Seven Fables (2009), Book VI of the Aeneid (2016), and Sweeney Astray, as well as versions of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (The Cure at Troy, 1991) and Antigone (The Burial at Thebes). But these are by no means the whole story. Altogether in the new collection, Heaney draws on thirty-nine poets from fourteen different countries (the lack of an index of poets is regrettable). Ireland, understandably, predominates, with Italy (Dante) and France next in line. Eastern Europe also features, recalling the essays in The Government of the Tongue on Czesław Miłosz, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, and Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam—poets who wrote, as Heaney put it, in “the indicative mode” posing a challenge to the cozier “conditional” mode of Western European and American poetry. In addition to these we have, among others, Brodsky, Cavafy, Pushkin, and Rilke.

His letters to Miłosz have, as Reid says, an “almost filial” affection

Of course, Heaney wasn’t fluent in all the languages from which he translates—which raises a question about the accuracy of referring to “translations.” He obviously read Irish, Latin, and French, as well as Old and Middle English, gaining access through the latter to the Middle Scots of Henryson, which has affinities with the speech of Ulster. In other cases he had to rely on cribs and existing translations, with help from native speakers where available. I can testify to the excellence of his translations from French. His Beowulf and Henryson are outstandingly good, although I enjoy the Henryson more, as Heaney himself seems to have done. (“I didn’t know or love Beowulf enough to remake it,” he admitted to O’Driscoll.) His brilliant introduction to the separately published Beowulf translation manages to be more exciting than the poem, whose austerities are unrelieved, but he catches both the pathos of Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and the colloquial swagger of the Fables. Among his other translations from Old English, one should single out “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the earliest surviving poem in the language. Caedmon’s situation, as a farm worker in a community dominated by a religious institution, would have evoked family memories for Heaney, who would also have responded to the emphasis on the inspiration behind the act of making: the ignorant cowherd becomes a lyric poet following an angelic visitation in a dream.

In “The Impact of Translation” (included in The Government of the Tongue), Heaney recalls Stephen Dedalus’s quip, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, that “the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead” (implying that only from abroad could Ireland really be understood), and adds that perhaps “the shortest way to Whitby”—for whose abbey Caedmon worked—“is via Warsaw and Prague.” Miłosz and Holub were crucially important to him poetically, although he did not translate either. His letters to Miłosz have, as Reid says, an “almost filial” affection; writing in 2002 to Fr. John Breslin, a Jesuit English teacher, Heaney comments, “I suppose I read him [Miłosz] as a kind of spiritual director, really.” His Eastern European translations are from lesser-known poets: Ana Blandiana and Marin Sorescu are Romanian, Ozev Kalda from Wallachia (now the Czech Republic). Heaney’s choices suggest a wish to show solidarity with artists who had suffered under political censorship and persecution.

The letters provide evidence of Heaney’s feelings about his own work, complementing the interviews in Stepping Stones. His early pseudonym, “Incertus,” for poems published in a student magazine, points to a diffidence that never quite left him; even after winning the Nobel Prize, he was always extravagantly grateful for any praise from fellow poets and other friends. He writes to Karl Miller that Field Work (1979) is not “as tight and obsessive” as North, but “I like to think there’s more of my personality relaxing in it.” He admits to Helen Vendler that “there was something doughy and dutiful” about the sequence “Station Island” in the book of the same name (1984). (Vendler, who became a friend, published a monograph on him in 1998.) In 2012, responding to enquiries from David-Antoine Williams about his linguistic and etymological interests, Heaney identified Wintering Out (1972) as “the collection where language and its historical/political charge come into focus,” adding that since Field Work “the language . . . was wanting to be more like clear glass than stained glass.” He was commendably determined not to stand still artistically, even if the element of experimentation didn’t always come off. In 1989, Craig Raine admitted to reservations about the relaxed manner of the sequence of forty-eight poems called “Squarings,” in a draft version of Seeing Things (1991), but added that he had eventually been won over. In his reply, Heaney expressed relief at this, acknowledging “vague intimations of a book more generously loosened out, with more draperies of meditative, discursive things—and a more spacious patchwork of the bits.” Both Vendler and Foster read “Squarings” in a positive light, as a visionary meditation on the process of creativity itself. Such an undertaking risks losing touch with the concrete, drifting too far into abstraction, a fault Heaney doesn’t always avoid.

Heaney’s later years were clouded by anxieties. In 2006, he had a minor stroke; in 2007 his wife, Marie, was treated (successfully) for breast cancer; in 2009 he turned seventy and had to endure “the passage of the media juggernaut” in celebrations that made him feel “plundered”; in 2010 and 2011 he suffered severe depression, which he overcame with the help of medication, but in the latter year he again had a small stroke. Inevitably, his thoughts turned to mortality. Two months after the first stroke, he wrote to Jane Miller that, although he had abandoned Catholicism, its “structured reading [of] the mortal condition” had never quite left him and emerged in the many poems he wrote about ghosts and the underworld (“I’ve always had a weakness for the elegiac”). This is evident not only in his original work—preeminently “Station Island” but also the late “Route 110” from his last collection, The Human Chain (2010)—but in his translations of Book VI of the Aeneid, the first three cantos of Dante’s Inferno, and the poem “Testimony: What Passed at Colonus,” from Sophocles. To Michael Alexander he reflected that, at seventy-two, he must be about the age Beowulf was when he fought the dragon. The final pages of Reid’s collection have a wistful, tender note, and in view of the anecdote with which I began this review I am glad to be able to record that in December 2012 Heaney took the trouble to write to a seventeen-year-old schoolboy fan, Dean Browne, thanking him for his letter of appreciation. Browne is now a published poet in his own right.

On August 30, 2013, Heaney sent a text message to Marie from the hospital on his way to an operation for a ruptured artery. It read Noli timere, “Don’t be afraid.” He died before the surgery could be performed. Two weeks earlier he had written his last poem, “In Time,” dedicated to his granddaughter Síofra. Foster tells us that, at the All-Ireland Gaelic football semifinal held shortly after Heaney’s death, “eighty thousand people stood and applauded for two minutes in homage.” One cannot imagine a comparable event occurring at Wembley Stadium after the death of an English poet. Whatever Heaney believed, or did not believe, about life after death, through his work he has assuredly had, and will continue to have, an unassailable afterlife.