Why does seamus heaney write

You can hear them draw the poles of stiles as they approach calling you out" Rilke, as referred to by Robin Skelton in another study of his, The Poetic Pattern, found "the ideal condition of the poet in something akin to childhood, when what lies behind is not the past and no future lies before, when in what he calls some interspace between the world and a plaything we entertain ourselves with the everlasting" Indeed, this title Oracle as it is interpreted here, makes a kind of image cluster, a series of connecting ideas which link myth, mystery, within the voice and ear of the listening boy or poet.

Mythos -- the word in the sense of the most ancient original account of the world is strangely related to mystery by the common root of muien -- "to close up" which evolved into mystery, mystic, secret. Thus the Greek mu — originally an inarticulate sound made by a beast - became both mystery and myth.

Here the primitive organs of lobe and larynx are the receptacle of mystery, and incarnate the myth of the oracle. Also, we think of the theory according to which there was originally one single primitive meaning in which abstract and concrete were undifferentiated. Spiritus was not simply breath evolving by metaphor into the principle of life -- both meanings existed at the origin. It is as if Heaney is aiming at reendowing language with this original pristine unity, as indeed does most poetic language try to restore "this primitive wholeness" In the case of Irish poetry, as Seamus himself tells us by the title of his essay, The Sense of Place is essential to Irish writers.

As he says on opening his essay: "In Irish poetry there is a whole genre of writing called dinnseanchas, poems and tales which relate the original meanings of place names and constitute a form of mythological etymology" Just before this, he has said something of most vital interest to our subject: "I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just as likely to be antipathetic. One is lived illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious.

In the literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist in a conscious and unconscious tension" In the domain of the "illiterate" and "unconscious" here, we have seen how the child has "known and cherished" his place of birth, and when this is allied as in Oracle to a mythological truth, it becomes also a "learned literate and conscious" reality.

In an essay entitled The God in the Tree, the mythological ascendancy becomes more specific in that we may not only relate it to a universal Greek and classical universe, but also to the ancestral myths of Ireland. Heaney refers to Mad Sweeney in his essay, the mad Ulster king who will feature in his latest collection, Station Island; "a foliate head, another wood lover and tree-hugger, a picker of herbs and drinker of wells" Thus a natural boyhood feeling for trees reveals itself as also an integral part of the literary and mythological heritage, and there is as it were an osmosis between these two aspects.

That is, the mythopoeic transmutation has not really occured — the thing is very much itself, it is an initial step, in what will later become a much more elaborate and mature process. To make clearer what I mean, we have only to glance at the poem entitled The Bam from his first collection. The final lines express what I wish to say by this distinctive form of perception: "I was chaff to be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.

I lay face-down to shun the fear above. The two lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats". In Death of a Naturalist this experience of evil is seen also as a step beyond the mere reality of things. Expressed in childlike music, especially centred on the vowel "o" sound Seamus really recounts his tadpoles expeditions "The waver thick slobber of frogspawn that grew like clotted water".

He would fill "jampotfulls" and "watch until the fattening dots burst". At the end of the poem, the toads become "great slime kings" A very obvious degradation of the initial joy sets in "The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour". And the poem ends on a musically nostalgic echo of the earlier " o " sound: "That all the lovely canfuls smelt of r o t.

These two " o "s of rot and not are hard sounds, and claim to be ironically linked with the kn o t of the early lines, the cl o t, and the jamp o ts. Another poem of obvious childhood relevance is Mid-Term Break, on the death of his little brother, and here the experience is an account, anecdotal with less immanent sense of its inherent content of evil, for the event is evil.

In any case, to sum up here, this form of exploration in memory leads into a kind of dead end, the cul-de-sac of lost paradise; it is only in poems such as Personal Helicon, where his well gazing sets the darkness echoing, or his discovery of that door in The Forge, that the child engenders the creative imagination as an opening into a fertile transcendental world.

Evil is indeed that rank sourness in Death of a Naturalist remembered suddenly in the heat of Madrid "Stinks of the fishmarket rose like the reek off a flax-dam", or the "patent leather of the Guardia Civil Gleamed like fish bellies in flax-poisoned waters" Here political evil has the sudden remembered stench of childhood evil.

The cultural, political heritage as the makings of the poet. In The Sense of Place he writes: "We are no longer innocent, we are no longer just parishioners of the local. We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill at the gable. Yet these primary laws of our nature are still operative. We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories" This, taken from A Sense of Place, is not explicitly political, it does however imply politics.

Seamus did not have to go far to "search for his political history" anyway; as in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, we can see history active at his frontdoor in this satirical portrait of the North. There is another North too however, that ancestral history which he seeks in archeological places, in Scandinavia.

As he says in The Tollund Man, "Out there in Jutland in the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, unhappy and at home" As a schoolchild brought up within a British governed province nourished on Gaelic literature he is part of that "divided mind" which is the legacy of every Irish writer indeed, but more so for the North.

Here, it is language rather than politics that enter into account; his poetry is fathered so to speak by a forked tongue. He says: "Certainly the secret of being a poet, Irish or otherwise, lies in the summoning of the energies of words. But my quest for definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of the landscape I was born into. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. Heaney's work is often a paean to the beauty and depth of nature, and he achieved great popularity among both general readers and the literary establishment, garnering a massive following in the United Kingdom.

He wrote eloquently about love, mythology, memory particularly on his own rural upbringing and various forms of human relationships. Heaney also provided commentary on the sectarian civil war, known as the Troubles, which had beset Northern Ireland in works such as "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.

Heaney was later applauded for his translation of the epic poem Beowulf , a global best-seller for which he won the Whitbread Prize. Eliot and David Cohen prizes, among a wide array of accolades.

He was known for his speaking engagements as well and traveled across the world to share his art and ideas. Heaney published his last book of poetry, Human Chain , in Regarded as a kind, lovely soul, he died in Dublin, Ireland, on August 30, , at the age of We strive for accuracy and fairness.

If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. It is also to see a newly fluent poet of pentameters, with their successive melodic ebb and swell. The claim is not new, but the emphasis might be. In , and again from to , Heaney taught at Harvard, usually for one term per year. This Heaney had many duties—to Harvard, to Irish culture—but he remained most committed, perhaps, to the people in his life.

Now strike your note. And then—his children grown or in their teens, his job and his reputation secure—Heaney decided to write about happiness. The poet had already moved from earth and water to fire and heat, and then over water again, across the Atlantic. Now he became a poet of air: one who wanted to share with his readers not so much extravagance as confidence, lightness, the ability to stay pleased.

Almost buoyant, occasionally repetitive, surprised by himself at least as often as he surprised readers, this Heaney remained self-conscious, revisiting and answering earlier verse.