Heaney and The Classics

HEANEY & THE CLASSICS

THE PULSE OF AN OLD ENERGY BEATING

Heaney & the Classics THE

Seamus Heaney by Antonio Olmos (© Antonio Zazueta Olmos)

Introduction

JOSEPH M. HASSETT

This exhibition explores how Seamus Heaney’s work brings order to the chaos around us by viewing life through the prism of the literature of the classical world. Heaney explained the role of the classical world in his work by observing that ‘consciousness needs coordinates, we need ways of locating ourselves in cultural as well as geographical space’.

Each case in the exhibit focuses on links between Heaney’s writing and particular classical works. It is part of Heaney’s genius that he enables us to experience these ancient writers as though they were our contemporaries by locating them in what he called ‘the aura of the eternal present that poetic language confers’.

Virgil has an especially luminous presence in Heaney’s work. This likely arises from the personal bond Heaney felt with Virgil when they met in the eternal present. Heaney explained this connection in remarks delivered on the occasion of his receipt of the degree of Doctor of Poetry from the University of Urbino in 2001:

When Virgil appears to me, it is not as someone who is heaven-sent by a Beatrice but rather as somebody encountered by chance on a road to the village. My native landscape, like his, is made up of fields and herds, hedges and homesteads. He had his beech trees under which the goatherds played their pipes; I grew up under beech trees that lined our laneway and felt as secure in that first home as Tityrus ever felt in his literary home in the first lines of the first eclogue. Then again, Virgil had his River Mincius, I have my River Moyola. Virgil moved from his father’s farm in the North to a poet’s retreat outside Naples in the South, I made [a] similar move from Ulster to Wicklow to Dublin. Virgil lived through civil war in the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination. I have experienced not only the civic violence of Ulster, but thanks to the age of technology, I have witnessed civil wars and ethnic conflicts all over the globe, blanket bombing and terrorist attacks. 1

Heaney’s relation to Virgil’s contemporary Horace is less personal but has vibrant historical resonance. The Augustan era poet provided a context for responding to the shock of the 11

September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Heaney explained in Stepping Stones that, guided by Czesław Miłosz’s approach to an analogous situation, he searched for ‘something like a calligraphic stroke that responded truly but in a different register’. He found the outlines of his stroke in Horace’s Ode I, 34. Heaney composed his own version and titled it ‘Anything Can Happen’. It begins:

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter

Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head

Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now

He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth

And the clogged underearth, the River Styx, The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.

As with Virgil and other classical writers, Heaney’s engagement with Horace reflects his magical ability to illuminate our lives with work that lives in the eternal present of the landmarks of the past. The cases and explanatory panels attempt to show Heaney’s magic at work.

In addition, this booklet contains two original essays that add depth and context. Roy Foster, whose most recent book is On Seamus Heaney (Princeton University Press, 2020), focuses his extraordinary abilities as historian and literary critic on Heaney’s use of a classical framework in ‘Mycenae Lookout’. Confronting the rage of this unsettling poem head-on, Foster provides new insight into how Heaney delivers a ‘high-voltage jolt, with an impact that gains force on every re-reading’. Bernard O’Donoghue, who is co-editing Heaney’s collected poems and is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, provides a brilliant overview that reflects both a scholar’s familiarity with classical literature, and a poet’s insight into Heaney’s craft.

JOSEPH M. HASSETT graduated from Canisius College and Harvard Law School, and received a Ph.D. and an honorary Doctor of Literature from University College Dublin. He received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award from President Higgins. His recent book is Yeats Now: Echoing into Life ( Lilliput, 2020).

1 Seamus Heaney, ‘Towers, Trees, Terrors: A reverie in Urbino’, in Gabriella Morisco (ed), ‘Seamus Heaney poeta dotto’, In Forma di Parole 23:2 (2007): pp. 152–3

Seamus Heaney demonstrated from the first a flair for interrogating and eviscerating the distant past in order to illuminate the present – particularly the violent present. It is evident in his early volumes, and makes a spectacular impact in the bog poems of North. ‘Mycenae Lookout’ occupies a formidable place in this tradition. The central section of the terrible story of the House of Atreus is delineated through the eyes of an onlooker, the Watchman whose soliloquy opens Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon: he records the king’s return from sacked Troy with Priam’s daughter the doomed prophetess Cassandra as his captive, and the queen Clytemnestra’s subsequent murder of her husband and his concubine, aided by her lover Aegisthus.

Heaney was not the first Irish poet to take on Aeschlyus’s play; in 1937 Louis MacNeice produced a modernised translation, much disapproved of by W.B. Yeats. Heaney’s version the Watchman’s perspective leaves out certain parts of the back-story (Clytemnestra’s hatred stems from Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia to enable the favourable wind that will bring the Greeks to Troy, and Aegisthus has his own reasons for murdering his royal cousin). But he complicitly observes the adulterous couple in the palace and his dreams project into the future, launching a prophetic vision of the foundation of Rome, marked – yet again – by the act of intimate murder (‘Small crowds of people watching as a man/Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran/Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.’) It is clear that past violence breeds its own inheritances, and that a cycle must be broken. The last section of the poem audaciously shifts the perspective forward to the poet’s own invocation of the healing powers of water, gushing from subterranean sources to irrigate the present.

And then this ladder of our own that ran deep into a well-shaft being sunk in broad daylight, men puddling at the source through tawny mud, the coming back up deeper in themselves for having been there, like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground, finders, keepers, seers of fresh water

in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps and gushing taps.

Heaney himself confirmed that the poem originated as a response to the IRA cease-fire in the autumn of 1994; he began composing it at the end of October that year, and the voices ventriloquized in the poem came in a rush (‘singing like stool pigeons’1) He had long been struck by the passage in Aeschylus’s play, where the watchman meditates upon his impotence to intervene or protest at the horrors he observes, using the metaphor of an ox sitting on his tongue. In some ways this allies him to the observer-figure in North, a wood-kerne spared from massacre; there are echoes too of the observer-persona in Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ and ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.’ Those Yeatsian poems were much in Heaney’s mind at the time: his speech receiving the Nobel Prize at Stockholm a year later would revolve around ‘Meditations’, the theme of the horrors perpetrated within enclosed and antagonistic communities, and the possibilities of an aftermath of reconciliation and rebuilding.

The drama of ‘Mycenae Lookout’ focusses on the brutal description of Cassandra, at once spoil of war and possessor of fatal knowledge – but seen here as a child-victim who harks back to the girl ‘cauled in tar’ in ‘Punishment’, one of the most brutal poems in North. The shock-effect is accentuated by the poem’s structure and language, marked by truncated lines and harsh frictatives.

No such thing as innocent bystanding.

Her soiled vest, her little breasts, her clipped, devastated, scabbed punk head, the char-eyed famine gawkshe looked camp-fucked and simple.

1 Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London, 2008), p. 465

‘The ladder of the future/And the past’: time-travelling in ‘Mycenae Lookout’

ROY FOSTER

Unlike in Aeschylus’s play, Cassandra does not speak in her own prophetic voice; she is visualized as the watchman sees her. Similarly, in Heaney’s evocation, Clytemnestra does not deliver the powerful evocation of a spoiled city which occurs in the play; the focus and perspective remains that of the observant though self-accusatory Watchman, channelling what Dennis O’Driscoll called Heaney’s ‘pent-up anger’.2 Here the poet uses this central figure much as he shaped the chorus in The Cure At Troy: in his own words, ‘the Greek chorus allows you to lay down the law, to speak with a public voice. Things you might not get away with in your own voice, in propria persona, become definite and allowable pronouncements on the lips of the chorus.’3 But above all there is ‘no such thing/as innocent bystanding’.

Helen Vendler, a leading critic and close reader of Heaney, sees ‘Mycenae Lookout’ as the ‘emotional centrepiece’ of his collection The Spirit Level, and it is hard to disagree.4 This is no less true because other powerful poems in the volume, such as ‘Two Lorries’ and ‘Keeping Going’, confront the inheritance of violence more directly, while ‘Tollund’ reflects the aftermath of the 1994 ceasefire and ‘The Flight Path’ deals with the recurring question of the poet’s duty to himself, to his ‘tribe’, and to history at a time of rending. Though the poems in this collection were mostly written well before the award of the Nobel, their appearance en bloc in The Spirit Level delivered a special impact as Heaney’s first major publication after the Prize – which was trailed emphatically on the book’s front cover.

Vendler’s reading of The Spirit Level emphasizes its status as a book about the ‘afterwards’ of endemic violent conflict, which is certainly true of the poems just instanced. But the concluding section of ‘Mycenae Lookout’, evoking streams of healing water and returning to the pumps and wells of the poet’s youth and early poetry, is not unproblematic in this regard; it begins, after all, with a bathtub receiving the returned and bloodied war hero.

A filled bath, still unentered and unstained, waiting behind housewalls that the far cries of the butchered on the plain keep dying into, until the hero comes surging in incomprehensibly to be attended to and be alone,

2 ‘Heaney in Public’ in Bernard O’Donoghue (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Cambridge, 2009), p. 63

3 Quoted in ibid, p. 62

4 Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (London, 1998), p. 156

stripped to the skin, blood-plastered, moaning and rocking, splashing, dozing off, accommodated as if he were a stranger.

What is not mentioned directly here is the ‘rope-net and blood-bath’ instanced in the previous section, ‘The Nights’: the fact that Agamemnon will be murdered in this very bath by his wife and cousin, who threw a net over the tub to contain him. We are back to the gory vision of the Watchman in the first section (‘I’d dream of blood in bright webs in a ford,/Of bodies raining down like tattered meat/On top of me asleep’). Water is not a healing element here, and the repetitions of violence suggest what the Watchman calls ‘the beating of the huge time-wound/We lived inside’. The idea of repetition and time-travelling recurs: ‘The ladder of the future/and the past, besieger and besieged, /the treadmill of assault’. And it is difficult to alight from a treadmill: after all, the incestuous bloodletting endemic to the House of Atreus will continue into another generation.

Heaney discussed some of these themes in a notably relaxed and informative 2001 interview with the acute Portuguese critic Rui Carvalho Homem:

What I wanted to do after the declaration of the cease-fires was to translate the Orestia as a kind of High Mass, a Te Deum, because we indeed seemed to be moving from an archaic culture of violence, blood feuding and revenge to some sense of the possibility of a system of civic justice. Athena buries the Furies under the Acropolis, at the end of the Orestia, and establishes some kind of reign of justice. Now, ideally, one might have done the three-part Orestia as a celebration of the new possibilities in Northern Ireland. Of course when I looked at the thing seriously, I remembered it had been translated by Tony Harrison years ago. I also knew that Ted Hughes was contemplating a version, and in the end I found it so overwhelmingly orchestral and magnificent I simply couldn’t face it. But I always, always, always had the watchman in my mind, for decades, and in particular his one phrase, a figure of speech: ‘An ox stands on my tongue.’ So that one character from the ‘Agamemnon’ set off the ‘Mycenae Lookout’ sequence in The Spirit Level.5

He returned to the subject in his interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll some years later, defending the crudity of the language in the Cassandra section; ‘even though the poem was written after 5 Rui Carvalho Homem, ‘On Elegies, Eclogues, Translations, Transfusions: an Interview with Seamus Heaney’, The European English Messenger, vol x no. 2 (Autumn 2001), p. 28

the 1994 cessation, the impulse was to give a snarl rather than sing a hymn’.6 The ‘ox on the tongue’ metaphor ignited childhood memories of the farmyard: ‘The splatter of cows’ feet on the floor of a byre in Mossbawn, the charge of bullocks up the “tripper” of a cattle lorry, the child’s register of the weight and danger of those clattering beasts. Slaughterhouse panic. It all added the necessary irrational charge and kick-started a couplet attack on the subject.’7

Earlier in this conversation Heaney asked rhetorically ‘Who’s to say where a poem begins?’ In the case of ‘Mycenae Lookout’ we can trace the genesis more closely than is usually possible, and we can also chart the ambivalence with which Heaney addressed the aftermath of epical violence. He once said that ‘the rending of the fabric of civilization is, by a tragic irony, one of the processes by which it continues’, pointing out that the figure of Caesar staring at his maps which opens Yeats’s great poem ‘Long-Legged Fly’ is ‘a destroyer as well as a visionary’. ‘Yeats had lived through too much history and violence in Ireland by the time he wrote that poem in the nineteen-thirties to be other than tragically clear about the nature of reality’. And yet, Heaney added,

What is thrilling is the certitude which the poem bestows upon the lifeengendering as opposed to the death-dealing aspects of reality, the beautiful conviction which it encourages in us that the tiny, tender, vulnerable effort of the fly’s life on the stream is equal to and fit for and redemptive of the implacable, power-focused, self-absorbed drive of the war-proofed conqueror. The idea of a civilised commonwealth promotes this dream of sweetness; fortifies belief in the worth of working for good, of keeping going in spite of the negative evidence.8

‘Mycenae Lookout’ gestures towards this optimism in its last section, but is undercut by the merciless nature of violent reality. Heaney found this as viscerally present in classical literature as in traditions nearer home, made clear in his lecture accepting the Nobel Prize in 1995. Appositely, news of the Prize reached him when he was in the Peloponnese, not far from Mycenae, visiting for the first time the fabled region which he had conjured up in his Sandymount study a year before. And the poem embodies another kind of travel in time, evoked by Heaney in that Nobel lecture when he quotes from the Iliad the evocation of a captive Trojan woman crying out at the death of her soldier husband. ‘Even today, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but

nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration-camp and the gulag, Homer’s image can still bring us to our senses.’9 At the present time when over-familiar images of war and slaughter crowd our own screens, ‘Mycenae Lookout’ delivers a similar high-voltage jolt, with an impact that gains force on every re-reading.

ROY FOSTER is Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Irish History and Literature, Queen Mary University of London. A prolific author and lecturer, Foster is probably best known for his widely acclaimed two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats published by Oxford University Press. A Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is the recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, including a President’s Distinguished Service Award in 2021. His most recent book is On Seamus Heaney (Princeton University Press, 2020).

6 O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 349

7 Ibid, p. 350

8 Speech to the Atlantic Foundation, 21 October 1997, privately printed.

9 Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry: the Nobel Lecture 1995 (Loughcrew, 1995), p. 27

Heaney and the Classical World BERNARD O’DONOGHUE

Seamus Heaney’s last published full-scale work was his posthumously issued translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI, edited by his daughter Catherine and Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis. It was an appropriate conclusion because translations of classical texts and passing references to them had been a major element in his work throughout his writing life. In Seamus Heaney and the Classics, a collection of essays edited in 2019, sixteen writers considered the many ways in which Heaney has drawn on Latin and Greek literature. Some deal with full-length works like Aeneid VI and his translations of two Greek tragedies by Sophocles; but there is a great deal of passing reference in Heaney to Classical authors: Aeschylus, Hesiod, Ovid, Horace, Livy.

The bedrock of Heaney’s encounters with the Classics was the Latin he studied (with as much success as enthusiasm) up to the end of his secondary schooling at St Columb’s College, Derry, culminating with Aeneid IX. He had had some preparation in Latin from his primary school teacher Bernard Murphy before he began at St Columb’s. A memorable moment at his funeral was when his son Michael referred to ‘his beloved Latin’. He did not study Greek, but he read it in translation and drew on it increasingly throughout his life.

But Latin came to him from all directions, as he says in an interview with Lorna Hardwick in 2007. In the 1960s, certainly in Catholic schools in England and Ireland, it was a central plank in education in Arts subjects. It took a long time for the Classics to lose their preeminent status there. As Heaney says in the Hardwick interview, Classics is like the latitude and longitude of consciousness in the West; it was a matter of self-improvement. Although Heaney did not go through the process himself at that stage, examination in Latin was a requirement for studying English at Oxford. As an example of the Aeneid’s centrality in that era, I did Aeneid VI for Matriculation in Ireland in 1962 and for the first-year preliminary examination in English at Oxford in 1966; I also had translated Aeneid IV and V for school examinations, as well as Livy and Tacitus. In his slightly earlier curricula, Latin would have been similarly prominent for Seamus Heaney. Like him, I regretted not doing Greek.

From the first, Heaney’s mythological reference is often the Classics rather than the Irish myths drawn on by Yeats and the other Celtic revivalists, as is evident from the items in this rich exhibition. In Heaney’s early poems, celebrated for their evocations of grounded, agricultural upbringing, the primary figure for this aspect of his experience is the Greek earth-tied giant

Antaeus, the opponent of the celestial Hercules. There is some precedence in Yeats and his coRevivalists here; Heaney’s immediate stimulus probably was Yeats who said in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ of himself and his collaborators in the Irish literary movement

All that we did, all that we said or sang

Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

Heaney’s early preference for the earthbound over the celestial comes back to mind when in 2004, while recognizing ‘the incontrovertible steadiness and clarity of Greek tragedy’, he says that it ‘can seem almost too Apollonian’ in certain moods: ‘We may want Goya instead of Sophocles’. Greek of course itself provided the alternatives that Heaney sets up between Goya and the Apollonian: the standard opposite, Dionysian, could be one term for Goya. The Classics provided most of the ‘coordinates’ that Heaney said consciousness needs, and he was ready from the first to be persuaded by the arguments of Italo Calvino in ‘Why Read the Classics’. A favourite word of his for this adequacy of the Classics in what Heaney called our ‘predicament’ was ‘stayingpower’, something he ascribed both to Sophocles and to the pastoral.

The textual history of this first complete poem on a classical subject, ‘Antaeus’, is notable. It was written in 1966, the year of Death of a Naturalist. But it wasn’t published until North in 1975, perhaps because that book provided a more fitting context for its confrontations. In Opened Ground, the first large-scale selected poems, it is left isolated between the poems of Death of a Naturalist and Door Into the Dark. There are other elements of passing classical reference in the early volumes: often passing allusions are as significant an indicator of internalized influence as extensive translation. The important marker-poem in the first book, ‘Personal Helicon’, draws on classical myth: ‘To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring’. This kind of mythical reference continues in the following books too; in a poem like ‘The Toome Road’ in Field Work, the Classics offer a language which can represent the occupying military forces without too direct a challenge:

O charioteers above your dormant guns, It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass, The invisible, untoppled omphalos.

The unfamiliar Greek term ‘omphalos’, the navel stone which marked the sacred centre of the world (perhaps borrowed by Heaney from Joyce), was used at the same time at the beginning of his essay ‘Mossbawn’ to represent the pump in the farmyard which symbolized the exclusive centrality of the home ground. If, as Lorna Hardwick says, this terminology of charioteers and omphalos offers ‘a terrific myth of colonization’, their unpredictability in this context enable the myth to work without being laboured.

The appeal and aptness of the Classics for Heaney was both particular and general. The particular appeal of Aeneid VI has been universally recognized: the journey to the afterlife to meet a father and the facilitating of that by travel on Charon’s boat, and Apollo’s golden bough which serves as a kind of travel-pass. More generally, the staying-power of Sophocles has provided a model for political issues of all ages: the need for the Greeks to have the military strength of Philoctetes, despite their distaste for his condition (the long spoon required to sup with the devil of violence), or the conflict between the family piety of the headstrong young woman Antigone – ‘the trouble-maker from Thebes’, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s phrase – and the inflexible political order required by Creon. As George Steiner says in his Antigones, the recurrent expression of such dilemmas in Greek tragedy is unmatched.

What particular needs do the Classics meet most crucially for Heaney? The use of the term ‘omphalos’ for the pump in the farmyard as the nutritional navel of young life to represent his native place is typical of how he makes the classical world correspond to and differentiate home. The Odyssean return to home, the nostos, is repeatedly and explicitly drawn on. It has often been noted that the title ‘District and Circle’ both for a book and for a poem within it expresses perfectly the circular movement away from an originary point and back to it. The late sequencepoem ‘Route 110’ takes particular episodes from Aeneid VI in parallel with apparently trivial or accidental moments in the poet’s young life, conferring depth and significance. What the classics do primarily is to validate and universalize points of personal experience by providing universal literary parallels. And it works both ways: Virgil’s happy shades among the blest in the afterlife – wrestling, dancing, running – are ‘Not unlike a sports day in Bellaghy’.

If his early love of Latin was the introduction to the classical world for Heaney, one that stayed with him throughout his life, it was from the 1990s onwards that the influence of Greek and the environment of Greece gained enhanced importance for him. It was partly the Field Day venture and its theatrical significance that gave Greece a new place in his life and work. He makes it clear that, from his very first visit to Greece, he found the environment there had an affinity with his native world which provided a new poetic stimulus. When in Stepping Stones Dennis O’Driscoll says ‘Considering that Latin had been your school subject, it is surprising how frequently you draw on Greek literature and myth’, Heaney replies that Roman material was ‘texted’ to students ‘whereas the Greeks turfed it all out on their own’. Epidauros had ‘a touch of Knock shrine about it, even Puck Fair’. Not that it was only the Rabelaisian or Dionysian that Greek offered; ‘King Augeus’s reeking yard and stables’ were where the Heaney’s heard of the murder of Sean Brown ‘in the grounds of Bellaghy GAA Club.’ Perhaps indeed it is above all else the possibility of writing about the intolerable and brutal violence of the last third of the twentieth century in Northern Ireland that was of most value to Heaney in drawing on the great classical myths: of writing about it without raising the political temperature in a way that risked contributing to that violence.

Of all the classical texts that Heaney draws on, this is most evident in ‘Mycenae Lookout’, a poem which turns to Aeschylus to evoke the ‘killing-fest’ of that era. The violence of the Oresteia frees him to use a language of sexual extremism in describing the injustice of the fate of Cassandra. In one of the additions to the story in The Cure at Troy, Heaney for once makes explicit the parallel with the ‘police widow in veils’ and the ‘hunger-striker’s father’. But later he says to O’Driscoll that he thinks that was a mistake: that the classical parallel does its own work without being spelled out – perhaps as Horace’s Ode carries the weight of the event in ‘Anything Can Happen’ without pointing a finger. Heaney can rely on the classics to bear that without his spelling it out. And it is exactly that reticence and tact that most distinguish his employment of classical sources in all these texts, enabling him to purge events of their horror while attaching gravitas to them.

BERNARD O’DONOGHUE is the author of ten collections of poetry, including his Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2008), Gunpowder (1995) (which received the Whitbread Poetry Award) and Farmers Cross (2011) (which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize). His long career as a scholar, writer and teacher at Oxford University includes his book Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995) and his editorship of The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2008). He is a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

HEANEY AND THE CLASSICS

Books on display as part of the exhibition in UCD Special Collections

Death of a Naturalist

New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

First American edition.

This copy is signed by Seamus Heaney and is inscribed ‘‘To set the darkness echoing’, 18th March 1971.’

Death of a Naturalist was Heaney’s first major published volume, and was awarded the Cholmondeley Award, the Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Shelf mark: 1.A .56

Door into the Dark

London: Faber and Faber, 1972.

First published, 1969.

Heaney’s second collection of poetry.

Shelf mark: 1.A .62

Hedge School

Sonnets from Glanmore with colour woodcuts by Claire van Vliet. Printed for Charles Seluzicki Fine Books in Salem Oregon at the Janus Press, Newark Vermont, 1979

From the colophon: ‘The text is set in Spectrum and printed on Barcham Green DeWint in an edition of two hundred and eighty five of which this is 281.’

This copy is signed at the colophon by Seamus Heaney and Claire van Vliet.

Shelf mark: 1.A .1B/17

Death of a Naturalist, Oxford University Press, 1966

The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes

Derry: Field Day, 1990

From colophon: ‘Published in a limited edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the author’.

This copy is number 297 and is signed by Seamus Heaney. This translation of was first performed in 1990 by the Field Day Theatre Company, directed by Stephen Rea and Bob Crowley. The well-known lines from the translation (beginning ‘History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave’) were quoted by Bill Clinton on his 1995 visit to Derry during the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Shelf mark: 1.A.53

Keeping Going

Poems by Seamus Heaney

Illustrations by Dimitri Hadzi

The Bow & Arrow Press, Adams House, Harvard for William B. Ewert, Published, Concord, New Hampshire, 1993

This is copy 55 and is signed at the colophon by Seamus Heaney, Dimitri Hadzi and Gino Lee.

Dimitri Hadzi (1921–2006) was an American modernist sculptor, and professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. He and his wife Cynthia were with Seamus and Marie Heaney in Pylos in the Peloponnese when they learned of the award of the Nobel Prize to Seamus.

Shelf mark: 1.A.140

The Spirit Level

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. American limited edition.

Published the year after Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, The Spirit Level was awarded the poetry prize at the 1996 Whitbread Awards.

Shelf mark: 1.A.84

The Cure at Troy, Field Day, 1990

Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996

First American edition: cream paper-covered boards, ‘SH ’ stamped in black on front cover with black lettering on spine; dust jacket illustrated with an image from the Ashmole Bestiary; 54 pages, 19cm.

Shelf mark: 1.A.29

Electric Light

London: Faber and Faber, 2001

This copy is signed by the author on the title page.

Seamus Heaney’s tenth collection, the poems in Electric Light found new imaginative territory, moving from the classical world and to the poet’s childhood, and contemplating the themes of origin and elegy.

Shelf mark: 1.A.63

The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone

Translated by Seamus Heaney.

London: Faber and Faber, 2004

Black paper-covered boards with spine letter in gold; dust jacket with gold and black design.

This copy is inscribed on the title page: ‘Joe – “From Delphi’s highfaced cliff, From the sunk Castalian spring –” With old friendship & regard, Seamus, 4. A . ’04 in Oxford.’

Shelf mark: 1.A .51

Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay by Seamus Heaney with Translations in Support of Art for Amnesty

Dublin: Town House, 2004.

In the essay, Heaney notes that the poem was written in late 2001 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and was first published in The Irish Times on 17 November, 2001 as ‘Horace and Thunder.’

Shelf mark: 1.A.48

District and Circle

London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

First edition. This copy is signed by the author on the title page. It also includes a printout of an invitation to Joseph Hassett to attend a celebration of this publication held by the Ambassador of Ireland and Mrs Antoinette O’Ceallaigh, 21 April 2006, at 17 Grosvenor Place, London.

Shelf mark: 1.A.59

The Burial at Thebes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

The Riverbank Field

With Paintings and Drawings by Martin Gale

Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2007.

From the colophon: ‘Five hundred copies of The Riverbank Field are published by The Gallery Press…Each is signed by the author and numbered.

Four hundred and fifty copies are for sale.’

This copy is number 139.

Born in Worcester, England, Martin Gale moved to Ireland as a child and studied at NCAD. The artist is best-known for his hyperrealistic landscape paintings, peopled by contemplative figures.

Shelf mark: 1.A.82

Human Chain

London: Faber and Faber, 2010

First edition in boards; maroon paper-covered boards with spine lettered in gold and light tan dust jacket, lettered in red and black.

Shelf mark: 1.A.72

Stone from Delphi: Poems with Classical References

Selected by Helen Vendler, with watercolour drawings by Wendy Artin.

San Francisco: Arion Press, 2012.

Colophon: ‘This book was designed and produced, in an edition of 300 numbered copies for sale and 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution.’

This copy is number 192, signed at the colophon by Seamus Heaney and Wendy Artin.

This copy also includes a prospectus for the edition.

Shelf mark: 1.A.11

Aeneid Book VI

Banholt; Dublin; Mexico City: Bonnefant Press, 2016.

Red morocco binding with decorated cover in matching cloth slip case. Illustrated with lithographs by Jan Hendrix (b. 1949), a Dutch-born, Mexico-based graphic artist.

Colophon: ‘Aeneid Book VI is set in 16 point Monotype Bembo by John Cornelisse and Hans van Eijk, and printed at the Bonnefant Press on Magnani Biblos paper.

This is copy number 66

Shelf mark: 1.A.3

Aeneid Book VI, Faber Members Collector’s Edition, 2016

Additional books featured on the exhibition panels in UCD Special Collections

North London: Faber and Faber, 1975

First edition in wrappers.

North was the first of Heaney’s collections to directly address the Troubles, using images and symbols to address the violence of political unrest in Northern Ireland.

Shelf mark: 1.A .78

The Spirit Level

London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

First edition in boards.

Shelf mark: 1.A .85

Articulations: Poetry, Philosophy and the Shaping of Culture

Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2008.

Colophon: ‘Five hundred copies of ‘Articulations: Poetry, Philosophy and the Shaping of Culture’ are published by the Royal Irish Academy. 450 are signed by the President of the Royal Irish Academy and 50 are signed by Seamus Heaney and Patrick Masterson. Four hundred and fifty copies are for sale.’

This copy is number 210, signed by James Slevin, President RIA . Published when the RIA Cunningham Medal was awarded to Seamus Heaney, this publication includes texts by Paul Muldoon, Jane Conroy, Seamus Heaney and Patrick Masterson.

Shelf mark: 1 A 12

Aeneid Book VI

London: Faber and Faber, 2016.

Faber Members Collector’s edition; cloth-bound spine with papercovered boards decorated and lettered in gold.

Shelf mark: 1 A 5

The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

First American edition.

Cover features a photograph of a sculpture by Heaney’s friend Dimitri Hadzi.

Shelf mark: 1 A 142

North, Faber and Faber, 1975

The books on display are a selection from a collection of Seamus Heaney works donated to UCD Special Collections by UCD alumnus Joseph M. Hassett, who also curated the exhibit in collaboration with Evelyn Flanagan and Kathryn Milligan of UCD Special Collections. The exhibition panels were designed by Ger Garland.

Cover images from:

Pitture de vasi antichi: possedute da sua

Ecellenza Il Sig: Cav: Hamilton (William Hamilton), Tomos 1–4, Societa Calcografica, Edizione prima Fiorentina, 1800–1803.

Front and inside back: (Tomo III plate 17)

Back: (Tomo I plate 31)

Inside front: (Tomo IIII plate 2)

Front and back, details:

Aeneid: Book VI translated by Seamus Heaney with lithography by Jan Hendrix, Bonnefant Press, 2016.

(© Jan Hendrix)

Special Collections

Reading Room

James Joyce Library

University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4.

Phone: +353 (0)1 716 7583

Email: library@ucd.ie

ISBN: 978-1-910963-69-2

© UCD, 2023