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Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's first collection of prose, Preoccupations , begins with a vivid account of his early years on his father's farm in Northern Ireland and his coming of age as a student and teacher in Belfast. Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Seamus Heaney
380 books1,085 followersWorks of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections
Wintering Out
(1972) and
Field Work
(1979) as well as a translation of
Beowulf
(1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 10, 2012
This book of Heaney's prose was a marvellous second-hand bookshop find. Heaney's prose is every bit as good as his poetry.
There was great variety in the pieces, ranging from the autobiographical/personal essays of the first section, through his more detailed lectures on particular poets or aspects of poetry, through to a final section of reviews written for various publications.
Of the personal pieces, his Mossbawn about his childhood had all the appeal of Dylan Thomas' writings about his childhood, but with a much greater clarity and precision to them. This was a delight to read and to read again.
His lectures on poets gave great insights into both the poets he wrote of and into his own writings. For instance he made brilliantly clear the difference between the poetic methods of Wordsworth & Yeats. Wordsworth as a master of 'composition as listening, a wise passiveness', whereas Yeats method is characterized 'not by compliance but control'. This sums up beautifully the contrast, and highlights a tension between these approaches to be found in Heaney's own work.
He is extremely good at the old 'compare & contrast' game. For instance in discussing the work of Kavanagh & Montague he says:
"...both ... look and listen with intensity inside their parishes, their eyes and ears pick up different things ... Kavanagh's place-names are there to stake out a personal landscape, they declare one man's experience ... Montague's are rather sounding lines, rods to plumb the depth of a shared and diminished culture."
With the chosen samples of their work, he make you want to rush to read both their work + getting back to Heaney's own poetry even more quickly.
His reviews show a great ability to make fair judgements of other poets work, but spiced with the humourous and provocative comments that make them great fun to read. One or two examples:
Hugh MacDiarmid: "In attempting the poetry of ideas ... can write like a lunatic lexicographer."
Stevie Smith: "Looked at the world with a mental squint, there is a disconcerting wobble in the mirror she holds."
Yet in each case he balances these little thrusts with an appreciation of their strengths.
I loved his piece "The labourer & the Lord". His summing up of Lord Dunsany was as succinct and acerbic, as it was entertaining: "His capacity for self-aggrandizement was immense, his inclination to self-scrutiny nil. There was charm (Kipling was fond of him), kindness (he managed Ledwidge's publications and helped him with money) and boorishness: an overbearing sense of himself as the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. Even when there were no eyes to see, he behaved dramatically."
It makes me want to go away and read more about the man - he promises great entertainment value.
Much more importantly, his appreciations of, and enthusiasms, for other poets - John hewitt, Osip Mandlestam, Robert Lowell and others, was infectious and made me keen to become better acquainted with their work too.
All in all he greatly increased the 'To read' list.
There was great variety in the pieces, ranging from the autobiographical/personal essays of the first section, through his more detailed lectures on particular poets or aspects of poetry, through to a final section of reviews written for various publications.
Of the personal pieces, his Mossbawn about his childhood had all the appeal of Dylan Thomas' writings about his childhood, but with a much greater clarity and precision to them. This was a delight to read and to read again.
His lectures on poets gave great insights into both the poets he wrote of and into his own writings. For instance he made brilliantly clear the difference between the poetic methods of Wordsworth & Yeats. Wordsworth as a master of 'composition as listening, a wise passiveness', whereas Yeats method is characterized 'not by compliance but control'. This sums up beautifully the contrast, and highlights a tension between these approaches to be found in Heaney's own work.
He is extremely good at the old 'compare & contrast' game. For instance in discussing the work of Kavanagh & Montague he says:
"...both ... look and listen with intensity inside their parishes, their eyes and ears pick up different things ... Kavanagh's place-names are there to stake out a personal landscape, they declare one man's experience ... Montague's are rather sounding lines, rods to plumb the depth of a shared and diminished culture."
With the chosen samples of their work, he make you want to rush to read both their work + getting back to Heaney's own poetry even more quickly.
His reviews show a great ability to make fair judgements of other poets work, but spiced with the humourous and provocative comments that make them great fun to read. One or two examples:
Hugh MacDiarmid: "In attempting the poetry of ideas ... can write like a lunatic lexicographer."
Stevie Smith: "Looked at the world with a mental squint, there is a disconcerting wobble in the mirror she holds."
Yet in each case he balances these little thrusts with an appreciation of their strengths.
I loved his piece "The labourer & the Lord". His summing up of Lord Dunsany was as succinct and acerbic, as it was entertaining: "His capacity for self-aggrandizement was immense, his inclination to self-scrutiny nil. There was charm (Kipling was fond of him), kindness (he managed Ledwidge's publications and helped him with money) and boorishness: an overbearing sense of himself as the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. Even when there were no eyes to see, he behaved dramatically."
It makes me want to go away and read more about the man - he promises great entertainment value.
Much more importantly, his appreciations of, and enthusiasms, for other poets - John hewitt, Osip Mandlestam, Robert Lowell and others, was infectious and made me keen to become better acquainted with their work too.
All in all he greatly increased the 'To read' list.
May 31, 2020
La experiencia me ha mostrado que hay que tener cuidado con los poetas que se meten de ensayistas, sin embargo aquí, en esta antología de trabajos en prosa, el poeta irlandés Seamus Heaney (Premio Nobel de Literatura 1995) se centra en un nutrido conjunto de reseñas aderezadas aquí y allá con unos poquísimos esbozos autobiográficos, varias conferencias y crítica literaria, lo que nos planta de entrada en territorio seguro.
Es un deleite tener este volumen a mano para entender mejor la estética de la poesía inglesa de la mitad del s. XX, comparando las diversas soluciones que a problemas de estilo, prosodia, lenguaje, y carácter dieron algunos de los poetas más importantes en lengua inglesa —¡y todo yendo de la mano con un autor que ama el lenguaje y no busca atraerse los reflectores para hacernos mirar a sus propias respuestas!
John Keats, William Wordsworth, W. B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, y Philip Larkin, por mencionar solo algunos, son diseccionados cuidadosa e inteligentemente bajo el escrutinio de Heaney a lo largo de más de 200 páginas de una prosa brillante, esmerada, casi perfecta y que está lejos de la crítica automática que inunda los suplementos literarios y muchas publicaciones electrónicas. Este libro es, en pocas palabras, una auténtica delicia y, parafraseando al poeta John Montague que lo reseñó para The Guardian, es como un pase de visita al taller poético de su autor. Imperdible.
Es un deleite tener este volumen a mano para entender mejor la estética de la poesía inglesa de la mitad del s. XX, comparando las diversas soluciones que a problemas de estilo, prosodia, lenguaje, y carácter dieron algunos de los poetas más importantes en lengua inglesa —¡y todo yendo de la mano con un autor que ama el lenguaje y no busca atraerse los reflectores para hacernos mirar a sus propias respuestas!
John Keats, William Wordsworth, W. B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, y Philip Larkin, por mencionar solo algunos, son diseccionados cuidadosa e inteligentemente bajo el escrutinio de Heaney a lo largo de más de 200 páginas de una prosa brillante, esmerada, casi perfecta y que está lejos de la crítica automática que inunda los suplementos literarios y muchas publicaciones electrónicas. Este libro es, en pocas palabras, una auténtica delicia y, parafraseando al poeta John Montague que lo reseñó para The Guardian, es como un pase de visita al taller poético de su autor. Imperdible.
April 4, 2025
Was Heaney a peasant pretending to be a highbrow, or the reverse? The last British poet of note - if he would accept the epithet - or the start of the rule of diversity over quality? I don't really know (and I really don't know). This is the first time I have read his prose but it confirms the impression made by his poetry, which is that of an intelligent man trying to say some intelligent but not very interesting things that he does not quite have the words for. The poets covered - Yeats, Kavanagh, Hughes, Hopkins - are a move away from the traditional pantheon of British poetry, but they are what you would expect in that they are all relevant to his Irish, provincial, Catholic background. And he writes about them like an indifferent student, quoting long passages at you but not always seeming to grasp the essence as Eliot, for example, does.
(And btw, what about Hughes? When all has been said about how he was a modern-day pagan and Viking, the fact remains that his poetry is full of very un-heroic words like 'probably', and 'occasionally', with attitudes to match. Provincials and metropolitans alike, though for different reasons, are apt to exaggerate the real influence of his northern origins on his poetry. But I suppose, with his background, it is refreshing that Heaney was willing to write an essay like 'Englands of the Mind'.)
His writing is saturated with the ungainly intellectualism that killed highbrow poetry in the period after the war; your eye runs over it, struggling to find a place to get a hold. As he quotes Yeats as saying, the great poets of old wrote for their verse to be spoken or sung, and for people to understand 'quickly or not at all'. Not to be pored over and analysed. Instead, as Orwell said, we produced a culture in which people instinctively felt there was something wrong with a poem that could be understood at first reading.
Perhaps that's why Heaney's best work is his 'translations', Sweeney, Beowulf, and the Aeneid; but even these, I have come to believe, are probably little more than rearrangements of translations by others. Come on: was Heaney really fluent in Latin, Old Irish, and Anglo-Saxon? There are few people competent to translate poetry from even one of those languages, in fact in the case of Irish they could probably be counted on one hand.
(And btw, what about Hughes? When all has been said about how he was a modern-day pagan and Viking, the fact remains that his poetry is full of very un-heroic words like 'probably', and 'occasionally', with attitudes to match. Provincials and metropolitans alike, though for different reasons, are apt to exaggerate the real influence of his northern origins on his poetry. But I suppose, with his background, it is refreshing that Heaney was willing to write an essay like 'Englands of the Mind'.)
His writing is saturated with the ungainly intellectualism that killed highbrow poetry in the period after the war; your eye runs over it, struggling to find a place to get a hold. As he quotes Yeats as saying, the great poets of old wrote for their verse to be spoken or sung, and for people to understand 'quickly or not at all'. Not to be pored over and analysed. Instead, as Orwell said, we produced a culture in which people instinctively felt there was something wrong with a poem that could be understood at first reading.
Perhaps that's why Heaney's best work is his 'translations', Sweeney, Beowulf, and the Aeneid; but even these, I have come to believe, are probably little more than rearrangements of translations by others. Come on: was Heaney really fluent in Latin, Old Irish, and Anglo-Saxon? There are few people competent to translate poetry from even one of those languages, in fact in the case of Irish they could probably be counted on one hand.
September 27, 2018
This is a collection of essays about poets and poetry by one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Some of the essays deal with icons of language arts (Yeats, Wordsworth, Hopkins), some are focused on figures held in esteem in literary circles but less popularly known (Mandelstam, Hewitt), and others are more topical, such as the excellent essay "The God in the Tree: Early Irish Nature Poetry." In every instance the reader gets to enjoy the musings of a Nobel Prize winner on the nuances and artistry involved in poetic wordcraft. To my mind, one of the most moving and provocative passages is this one in the essay on Paul Muldoon: "If we miss the opulence of the music, the overspill of the creative joy, we miss the poem. The life of the thing is in the language's potential for generating new meanings out of itself, and it is this sense of buoyancy, this delight in the trickery and lechery that words are capable of, that is the distinguishing mark of [poetry]."
April 1, 2022
Sometimes the prose of a great poet is more influential in fostering the value and pleasure of poetry than the thing itself. Most of this "selected prose" (I do like that term, it makes me imagine someone collaging my best Facebook posts and one-liners in messages to friends as a tribute after death) is taken from speeches Heaney gave to various universities, but although he drums on the same poets, he doesn't repeat himself.
Non-essential reading that was very useful for me in this present moment to reignite a passion for the potential of elegant, selected words. Almost makes me want to try writing poetry myself, if only that I could follow along my maturity as an artist as Faulkner outlined, that all novelists are firstly failed poets and secondly failed short-story writers.
How many circles of failure have I passed through to desire to become a reviewer of merit? I dread to consider.
Non-essential reading that was very useful for me in this present moment to reignite a passion for the potential of elegant, selected words. Almost makes me want to try writing poetry myself, if only that I could follow along my maturity as an artist as Faulkner outlined, that all novelists are firstly failed poets and secondly failed short-story writers.
How many circles of failure have I passed through to desire to become a reviewer of merit? I dread to consider.
December 14, 2023
Heaney spits bars
December 1, 2025
after-image of lamps / swung through the yards / on winter evenings
October 28, 2025
"When I was at school the skeleton of an elk had been taken out of a bog nearby and a few of our neighbors had got their photographs in the paper, peering out across its antlers. So I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in it and to it. In fact, if you go round the National Museum in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion of the most cherished material heritage of Ireland was 'found in a bog.'"
November 19, 2019
Apparently I'm not the only nerd interested in Yeats and musicality. Oh Heaney, you're my intellectual soul-mate
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews