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Seamus Heaney
Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world's great poets.
Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times.
With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes.
Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.
Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times.
With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes.
Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.
206 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 1998
About the author
Helen Vendler
70 books89 followersHelen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.
Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.
Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 4, 2018
He has rethought the sonnet, the elegy, the historical poem, the archaeological poem, the sequence; he has invented a new vein of phenomenological abstraction in landscape poetry; he has renovated terza ryma in demotic language, and, in his ‘squarings’, explored the potential of the douzain. He has written with an acute sense of the linguistic inheritance, both etymological and syntactic, of English – from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, the Romance languages – and has renovated the English of Irish poetry in consequence. Poems become memorable if and only if they renovate language and symbol and structure and genre; otherwise they fall into the abyss of the forgotten. [p12]
Seamus Heaney found his ideal reader and his ideal interpreter in Helen Vendler. She praises his exceptional ability to find diverse, effective and beautiful ways to express challenging thoughts and this is certainly something that can said of her own writing with the same enthusiasm. This book is the product of substantial investigations on her part, and as such confirms that it would be feasible and entirely satisfying to devote half a lifetime to just this one poet without exhausting the layers of his work, which is only reasonable since it is his life’s work we are examining. However, his work in turn has to be seen within the entire stream of poetry and literature and the topic expands beyond our grasp. As that is not an option for most of us, we can turn instead to this guide.
Vendler builds up her account of Heaney’s work with reference to each volume in turn, from Death of a Naturalist to The Spirit Level, nine books in all, which omits Heaney’s later writing. This is not a simplistic guide, although it does decode a number of obscure poems, but it is virtually a meditation in its own right, exploring what the poems reveal about Heaney’s personal development as a poet, which incorporates his technical development as a writer experimenting with every aspect of his trade, his development as a human passing through life’s stages, and his awareness of and changing views about his role in society. It gives priority to the study of Heaney’s use of language, but even so the exploration of the themes addressed is also thoughtful and fascinating.
Each of his volumes ambitiously sets itself a different task from its predecessors; each takes up a new form of writing; and just when one thinks one knows all of Heaney’s possibilities of style, he unfurls a new one. His readers, even when they do not notice technique in any explicit way, are being persuaded into the poem by words, by syntax, by structures, as well as by themes and symbols. [p3]
I myself regard thematic arguments about poetry as beside the point. Lyric poetry neither stands nor falls on its themes; it stands or falls on the accuracy of the language with which it reports the author’s emotional responses to the life around him. [p6]
Each successful poem presents itself as a unique experiment in language... Each poem says, ‘Viewed from this angle, at this moment, in this year, with this focus, the subject appears to me in this light, and my responses to it spring from this set of feelings.’ [p7]
’To hold in a single thought reality and justice’ – Yeats’s definition in A Vision of Hope of the hope of lyric – is one that Heaney often quoted. Reality is how things are; justice is how things should be. [p10]
Vendler discusses Heaney’s first three collections around the theme of “anonymities.” In Heaney’s early work ‘symbolic figures’, such as those in ‘Seed Cutters’, stand for the poet’s recognition of the immemorial nature of the work done on the family farm... Because such figures are anonymus, his poetic voice will also be anonymous: he will speak both about and for those whose names are lost to history. [p13] She notices that “anonymity is not usually the first choice of a young poet” [p14] and goes on to discuss the many identities available to the young Heaney, identities others wish to impose on him, while he refuses to conform to what is expected.
In framing the collection called “North” around the concept of archaeologies, Vendler argues that Heaney had the idea of exploring violence and death in the distant past as a way to escape “the journalistic clichés” [p52] through which the media insisted on describing the ongoing violence in Nortern Ireland at that time.
The bodies do not want to be beatified (religious language is inadequate to them), nor did they exist to be murdered (the language of violence is inadequate to them). What they claim now, and claimed in life, is what all human being want: existence on the same terms as their fellows. [p48]
Vendler chooses the theme of Anthropologies for the collection called Field Work, a reference to the time spent by an anthropologist among the people who are to be the subject of study, and this is the attitude assumed by Heaney towards the people in his own life. However, the chapter primarily discussed Heaney’s approach to writing elegies, in the context of continuing sectarian violence.
The Heaney style - earlier so apt in conveying the immemorial and the immobile – is now called on to sketch the living as they were before their annihilation and to do justice to the moment of extinction. The problem of elegy is always to revisit death while not forgetting life, and the structure of any given elegy suggests the relation the poet postulates between these two central terms. [p60]
The point of the anthropology metaphor is that Heaney challenges the very language of sectarianism through his “field-work”
Not all the Irish are in Ireland always, and not all those inhabiting Ireland were born there or will die there. These facts are inconvenient to the unitary view of both nationalist propaganda and single-minded mythology, but they are the very stuff of cultural interest for an ethnographer or anthropologist. [p64]
What one chiefly takes away from Field Work is Heaney’s deliberate choice to remain on the human, colloquial, everyday level – to remain there even for elegies, which normally tend towards apotheosis, and even for love-poems, which normally tend towards the elevatingly idealized. [p74]
I won’t summarise the entire book here. The point is that Vendler is continually dipping back and forth between the vocabulary and language used, the poetic form and structure with its history in poetry, and Heaney’s social engagement on many levels, personal and political. It becomes clear that Heaney has invested a lifetime into his craft and placed it at the service of his own wider community, helping them to interpret and cope with the most important social issues of that particular time and place. This brilliant, forensic examination of Heaney’s poetry is capable of being intimidating, but the point is that Vendler has placed her own immense grasp of these matters at our service in this beautiful book. She has the erudition to cope with Heaney at his most challenging, and the grace to present this to us readers in a form that is accessible, often moving, always interesting.
Heaney emerges as a great artist but also as a great thinker - both engaging and relevant. His poetry is important and Vendler explains why.
The rights of discourse seem, alarmingly, to have passed to the untrustworthy: it is ‘the subversives and collaborators’ who are ‘always vying with a fierce possessiveness / for the right to set “the island story” straight’. The importance of these poems of competing discourses lies in the poet’s conviction that the person who owns the language owns the story, and he who wishes to change the story must first change the language. [p126]
Seamus Heaney found his ideal reader and his ideal interpreter in Helen Vendler. She praises his exceptional ability to find diverse, effective and beautiful ways to express challenging thoughts and this is certainly something that can said of her own writing with the same enthusiasm. This book is the product of substantial investigations on her part, and as such confirms that it would be feasible and entirely satisfying to devote half a lifetime to just this one poet without exhausting the layers of his work, which is only reasonable since it is his life’s work we are examining. However, his work in turn has to be seen within the entire stream of poetry and literature and the topic expands beyond our grasp. As that is not an option for most of us, we can turn instead to this guide.
Vendler builds up her account of Heaney’s work with reference to each volume in turn, from Death of a Naturalist to The Spirit Level, nine books in all, which omits Heaney’s later writing. This is not a simplistic guide, although it does decode a number of obscure poems, but it is virtually a meditation in its own right, exploring what the poems reveal about Heaney’s personal development as a poet, which incorporates his technical development as a writer experimenting with every aspect of his trade, his development as a human passing through life’s stages, and his awareness of and changing views about his role in society. It gives priority to the study of Heaney’s use of language, but even so the exploration of the themes addressed is also thoughtful and fascinating.
Each of his volumes ambitiously sets itself a different task from its predecessors; each takes up a new form of writing; and just when one thinks one knows all of Heaney’s possibilities of style, he unfurls a new one. His readers, even when they do not notice technique in any explicit way, are being persuaded into the poem by words, by syntax, by structures, as well as by themes and symbols. [p3]
I myself regard thematic arguments about poetry as beside the point. Lyric poetry neither stands nor falls on its themes; it stands or falls on the accuracy of the language with which it reports the author’s emotional responses to the life around him. [p6]
Each successful poem presents itself as a unique experiment in language... Each poem says, ‘Viewed from this angle, at this moment, in this year, with this focus, the subject appears to me in this light, and my responses to it spring from this set of feelings.’ [p7]
’To hold in a single thought reality and justice’ – Yeats’s definition in A Vision of Hope of the hope of lyric – is one that Heaney often quoted. Reality is how things are; justice is how things should be. [p10]
Vendler discusses Heaney’s first three collections around the theme of “anonymities.” In Heaney’s early work ‘symbolic figures’, such as those in ‘Seed Cutters’, stand for the poet’s recognition of the immemorial nature of the work done on the family farm... Because such figures are anonymus, his poetic voice will also be anonymous: he will speak both about and for those whose names are lost to history. [p13] She notices that “anonymity is not usually the first choice of a young poet” [p14] and goes on to discuss the many identities available to the young Heaney, identities others wish to impose on him, while he refuses to conform to what is expected.
In framing the collection called “North” around the concept of archaeologies, Vendler argues that Heaney had the idea of exploring violence and death in the distant past as a way to escape “the journalistic clichés” [p52] through which the media insisted on describing the ongoing violence in Nortern Ireland at that time.
The bodies do not want to be beatified (religious language is inadequate to them), nor did they exist to be murdered (the language of violence is inadequate to them). What they claim now, and claimed in life, is what all human being want: existence on the same terms as their fellows. [p48]
Vendler chooses the theme of Anthropologies for the collection called Field Work, a reference to the time spent by an anthropologist among the people who are to be the subject of study, and this is the attitude assumed by Heaney towards the people in his own life. However, the chapter primarily discussed Heaney’s approach to writing elegies, in the context of continuing sectarian violence.
The Heaney style - earlier so apt in conveying the immemorial and the immobile – is now called on to sketch the living as they were before their annihilation and to do justice to the moment of extinction. The problem of elegy is always to revisit death while not forgetting life, and the structure of any given elegy suggests the relation the poet postulates between these two central terms. [p60]
The point of the anthropology metaphor is that Heaney challenges the very language of sectarianism through his “field-work”
Not all the Irish are in Ireland always, and not all those inhabiting Ireland were born there or will die there. These facts are inconvenient to the unitary view of both nationalist propaganda and single-minded mythology, but they are the very stuff of cultural interest for an ethnographer or anthropologist. [p64]
What one chiefly takes away from Field Work is Heaney’s deliberate choice to remain on the human, colloquial, everyday level – to remain there even for elegies, which normally tend towards apotheosis, and even for love-poems, which normally tend towards the elevatingly idealized. [p74]
I won’t summarise the entire book here. The point is that Vendler is continually dipping back and forth between the vocabulary and language used, the poetic form and structure with its history in poetry, and Heaney’s social engagement on many levels, personal and political. It becomes clear that Heaney has invested a lifetime into his craft and placed it at the service of his own wider community, helping them to interpret and cope with the most important social issues of that particular time and place. This brilliant, forensic examination of Heaney’s poetry is capable of being intimidating, but the point is that Vendler has placed her own immense grasp of these matters at our service in this beautiful book. She has the erudition to cope with Heaney at his most challenging, and the grace to present this to us readers in a form that is accessible, often moving, always interesting.
Heaney emerges as a great artist but also as a great thinker - both engaging and relevant. His poetry is important and Vendler explains why.
The rights of discourse seem, alarmingly, to have passed to the untrustworthy: it is ‘the subversives and collaborators’ who are ‘always vying with a fierce possessiveness / for the right to set “the island story” straight’. The importance of these poems of competing discourses lies in the poet’s conviction that the person who owns the language owns the story, and he who wishes to change the story must first change the language. [p126]
May 13, 2012
Helen Vendler is by far the most inspired, concise and delightful of Heaney's critics. Her book is a pleasure to read and her insights into the tropes of Heaney's poetry are deep and far-reaching. On top of her evocative, well-researched critical views, the book is a wonderful read for non-literary scholars as it is accessible and informative. It is one of those books of criticism that genuinely inspire you: Vendler speaks in a language that is complementary with Heaney's somehow. Highly recommended read.
September 8, 2012
Helen Vendler writes in a quiet style that complements Seamus Heaney's own style. She brings details of his life to bear on details of his poems, and shows how the poems are a contemplation, and a conversation with and about the life he is living. Seamus Heaney is surely the master of the sacred act of beholding and Helen Vendler beholds him and his poetry in such a way that we are enlightened and more likely to behold all that is holy in the lives we live. -- I found that a copy of Heaney's Collected Poems was a huge help and deeply enriched my appreciation of this book. I would flip from one to the other over and over, so that I really nested this one inside the collected poems, and worked my way through both together.
March 17, 2018
#ReadIreland18
Happy St. Patrick's Day
Erin Go Bragh!
Review
Happy St. Patrick's Day
Erin Go Bragh!
Review
March 24, 2018
Super useful - always find it odd when books like this make me feel really happy...
May 28, 2019
This is an excellent resource for understanding and appreciating Seamus Heaney's poetry. Although I've been reading his poems for a number of years, I still learned a great deal from Helen Vendler's intelligent discussion of Heaney's work. The initial appeal of Heaney's poems for me was their accessibility. Many of his poems--such as Follower, Mint, Punishment, etc.-- can be understood and appreciated on a surface level, without having to understand the underlying context or purpose. Helen Vendler does a brilliant job in describing the development of Heaney as a poet and illuminating a number of poems which might not be as easily absorbed by a casual reader. I was especially struck by the way Heaney was often forced to negotiate the demands of being a public figure--in his case, a Catholic public figure in Northern Ireland during the Troubles-- with his commitment to his art. How does one compose poems of meaning and significance in a climate of violence? What place does poetry have in such an environment? Seamus Heaney had to wrestle with these questions and Helen Vendler goes a great way in explaining the results.
May 2, 2019
I have loved the poetry of Seamus Heaney since being introduced to his work over thirty years ago even when I have puzzled over a poem, its meaning escaping me. Helen Vendler's study illuminates so much of what I didn't understand and elevates Heaney's work to art, just as it should be. Vendler traces Heaney's development as a poet here from 1966 - 1996 as he became a poet of public and private life and documents his rethinking of the sonnet, the elegy, the historical and archeological poem, just to name a few.
"Poems become memorable, if and only if, they renovate language and symbol and structure and genre; otherwise they fall into the abyss of the forgotten."
Helen Vendler is a brilliant academic; I needed to reread chapters a few times, and that only enhanced my reading of Heaney's poetry.
"Poems become memorable, if and only if, they renovate language and symbol and structure and genre; otherwise they fall into the abyss of the forgotten."
Helen Vendler is a brilliant academic; I needed to reread chapters a few times, and that only enhanced my reading of Heaney's poetry.
Read
March 3, 2018I would never read the last page of a novel before beginning -- but it's another kind of guilt to read dedications, epigraphs and acknowledgments first. I read this because Heaney's The Spirit Level is dedicated to her, and I'd hoped this would match her book on Dickinson in conversational close reading. It doesn't, but that's what I get for being a roman numerals page troll.
June 24, 2025
I thought this was a biography when I picked it up, but it is actually a critical study of Heaney's poetry from The Death of a Naturalist to Spirit Level. Published in 1998 it is an academic study - Vendler was a Professor of English and American literature at Harvard* - with all the linguistic depth that such studies have. It is easy to criticise academic writing sometimes for being opaque or unnecessarily verbose, but Vendler's book is not too bad. It does occasionally drift into sentences that require access to a dictionary to parse, but I suspect it wasn't written for an audience that wasn't going to study this poetry in-depth.
It did two good things though. It reminded me once again how shallow my analysis of most poetry is. If literary criticism is an ocean I am standing on the beach with my trouser legs rolled up and my socks and shoes off paddling in the icy water too afraid or too unskilled to go any further out. Vendler is out there in the deep.
It is not necessarily a terrible thing to get ones impressions of art at a shallow level and the more you indulge the more you'll know how to compare and contrast. Immediate responses aren't necessarily wrong, even if they can miss some of the depth. Vendler gives us some of the tools that one needs, although I think this is a book to read after reading Heaney.
Reading literary criticism before reading the original literature often puts other people's ideas/responses in your head when you finally meet the actual work itself. Read the work, then the criticism when you've at least had a chance to make your own mind up about it.
The other thing it does, and on this level alone it makes the book a success is make you want to read more Heaney. To get in there amongst the weeds and do your own digging.**
It made me want to have another go at writing poetry too. But that's a whole other kettle of fish.
*She died in 2024.
**Reference intended.
It did two good things though. It reminded me once again how shallow my analysis of most poetry is. If literary criticism is an ocean I am standing on the beach with my trouser legs rolled up and my socks and shoes off paddling in the icy water too afraid or too unskilled to go any further out. Vendler is out there in the deep.
It is not necessarily a terrible thing to get ones impressions of art at a shallow level and the more you indulge the more you'll know how to compare and contrast. Immediate responses aren't necessarily wrong, even if they can miss some of the depth. Vendler gives us some of the tools that one needs, although I think this is a book to read after reading Heaney.
Reading literary criticism before reading the original literature often puts other people's ideas/responses in your head when you finally meet the actual work itself. Read the work, then the criticism when you've at least had a chance to make your own mind up about it.
The other thing it does, and on this level alone it makes the book a success is make you want to read more Heaney. To get in there amongst the weeds and do your own digging.**
It made me want to have another go at writing poetry too. But that's a whole other kettle of fish.
*She died in 2024.
**Reference intended.
August 27, 2011
A former Visiting Professor of mine....who is also a Nobel Laureate. He gave me an A, definitely underserved..,. but poetry is part of being Irish...
April 9, 2014
She is such a good reader, and this book really helped me with the poems and their context.
February 6, 2016
An excellent overview of the poetry of Seamus Heaney.
May 2, 2017
A deep and vastly helpful analysis of Seamus Heaney's poetry, and how it relates to himself and Ireland.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews