Heaney’s poetry is known and recited in an age when poetry is a marginal art form; he was that now-extinct thing, the poet-celebrity whose poems are very, very good. And now, after almost a decade of work from three editors, those poems will be available in one place. Faber’s new collected edition, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, runs to almost 1,300 pages of poetry and commentary. It also includes 25 previously unpublished poems, chosen by the Heaney family, one of which is printed here below for the first time.
It all began in a small village in Co Derry called Bellaghy. Heaney was born there, at home on the family farm, Mossbawn, in 1939, and much of his poetry was written about this particular area — from the wonders of the well in Personal Helicon to the tragedy of his brother Christopher’s death in Mid-Term Break: “A four-foot box, a foot for every year.”
Today, Bellaghy is a bustling town, with several cafés, pubs and corner shops — and that’s in no small part thanks to Heaney. In 2016 the Seamus Heaney HomePlace Centre opened there, a museum dedicated to his work and to the people and places that inspired him. In the past year they have welcomed 132,000 visitors. Heaney is big business.
When I speak to Cathy Brown, the museum’s manager, she says she emphasises the importance of Heaney’s local roots to visitors. “We think about Seamus Heaney the poet, but I found when I came to work here that for a lot of people around here, that’s not the first thing they think. They think of their cousin, of their neighbour.”
Or their brother. Dan Heaney is the youngest of the nine Heaney siblings — at 74 he still calls himself “the baby” of the family — and in certain lights, you might imagine you are speaking to the Nobel prizewinner himself. He is quiet, self-effacing — and absolutely hilarious. Dan initially found the plans for a museum for his brother a bit strange — in the most Irish of ways, he despises a fuss — but he has come round to the idea and is now a regular visitor to the centre.
Sometimes he even tells visitors who he is — “just because I know it would please them” — but this hasn’t always gone to plan. Once, speaking to a little boy on a school trip, he said: “I’m Dan Heaney, I’m Seamus’s brother.” The child looked up at him and asked: “Who’s Seamus?”
For Dan, though, the question wasn’t so extraordinary. In Heaney’s lifetime Dan rarely saw him as a famous person. When Death of a Naturalist was published in 1966 Dan was a student at St Columb’s, the same boys’ grammar school in Derry that Heaney had once attended. “I remember Father Devlin coming to me in the study and saying, ‘Seamus has had a book published.’ And that was it, no fanfare or nothing like that.”
In 1995 Dan discovered that Seamus had won the Nobel prize (he refers to it as “the Stockholm bother”) in a similarly low-key way. He was then a teacher in a nearby school, and was standing outside, hoping to get a lift home as his wife, Mary, a nurse, was using the car. “A fellow stopped and gave me a lift, and he said, ‘That’s powerful news about Seamus.'” The headline in the Irish Farmers Journal was “Bellaghy celebrates as farmer’s son wins top literary award”.
It’s no wonder that Heaney stayed down to earth. In Casualty, his poem about the death of a local man, Louis O’Neill, in a pub bombing, he remembers their conversations. When Louis would ask about poetry, Heaney says that, “shy of condescension,/ I would manage by some trick/ To switch the talk to eels”.
Despite his international profile, Heaney was, to friends and family in Bellaghy, just “our Seamus”. Dan tells me that family parties would often feature poetry recitals, but never of Heaney’s work. Instead he’d perform Piddling Pete, a comic rhyme about a semi-incontinent dog: “He piddled on the cornflakes/ He piddled on the floor/ And when the grocer threw him out/ He piddled up the door.” It’s all a far cry from his translations of The Aeneid.
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More than that, what person after person tells me — whether they knew Heaney well, just met him once or sent him a letter — is that he was incredibly generous with his time. When Dan’s daughter graduated from Trinity, Seamus and his wife, Marie, joined the family for pizza to celebrate. “He landed down and had a couple of pints with us,” Dan says. “Then he rushed off to interview Derek Walcott in the Abbey [theatre]. We took it for granted. I look back and say, that man was up to his eyeballs.”
For Bernard O’Donoghue, who edited The Poems of Seamus Heaney alongside Matthew Hollis and Rosie Lavan, this is what marks Heaney out as a man and a poet. “His generosity of spirit, his friendliness and his willingness to co-operate in all kinds of ways meant that he couldn’t just go for a quiet, artistic life.”
We meet in O’Donoghue’s home in Oxford, where he is an emeritus fellow in English. He is also a poet, and was friends with Heaney. The pair were particularly close during Heaney’s five-year term as Oxford professor of poetry (during his lectures, O’Donoghue says, “people were literally sitting on the windowsills”).
Gentle and softly spoken, O’Donoghue admits to being “in awe” of Heaney, even after spending almost a decade with his work, scouring typescripts and scribbled notes, charting variants and researching influence. But I’m keen to ask him about the trickier elements of Heaney’s legacy — the criticism he came under, and how it shaped him.
Most of the controversy that Heaney faced can be located in his seminal collection North, in which, after years of hesitation, he looked the Troubles in the face. His best-known reflection on the subject is perhaps Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, an ode to Northern Ireland as a “land of password, handgrip, wink and nod” in which Protestant and Catholic identity is everything. But Heaney was also inspired by the discovery of naturally preserved Iron Age bodies found in peat bogs in northern Europe.
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In Punishment, perhaps Heaney’s most controversial poem, he compares the preserved body of a woman who was killed for adultery to the women who were tarred and feathered by the IRA for having relationships with British soldiers.
The criticism came from two fronts. First, there was a sense that comparing the specific violence taking place in Northern Ireland to centuries-old “tribal, intimate revenge” was inadequate, and threatened to normalise the conflict. The Belfast poet Ciaran Carson accused Heaney of being “the laureate of violence — a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for ‘the situation'”. Asked about this review, Heaney later admitted: “There was a bitter drive to a lot of that stuff that you couldn’t not be taken aback by, but it never made me doubt the book.”
But feminist critics were also uneasy about the poem. For academics like Fran Brearton, the use of the female body as a metaphor for a much broader conflict was exploitative, and the semi-sexualised description of that body — the wind “blows her nipples/ to amber beads” — exemplified a male gaze. The commentary in the new collected edition admits that Heaney displayed a “somewhat defensive intolerance of literary analysis of this kind”.
I speak to Susannah Dickey, a poet and novelist who grew up in Derry and whose collection Isdal won the PEN Heaney prize in 2024. Isdal also centres the body of a woman — the “Isdal Woman” — but to very different effect. When I ask her about the feminist critique of Heaney’s work, she points out that Heaney criticises himself in the poem: “I am the artful voyeur/ of your brains exposed.” In fact, it was from Heaney, she says, that she learnt “how you can make those messy ethical uncertainties and those fears of your own complicity and your own voyeurism part of the project”.
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Does Dickey spy Heaney’s influence in the work of her contemporaries? “He was a singular talent,” she says, “but he also created poetry in a way that anyone really could aspire to create poetry.” Heaney wrote about small people, small places, using local words — and still his profundity had a global impact.
Heaney’s death in 2013, aged 74, was a shock — to his family as well as to the world. He had suffered a stroke in 2006, a terrifying ordeal that animated his final collection, Human Chain, with a kind of anticipatory grief for his own life. But seven years later he fell outside a restaurant and died the next morning, after a medical procedure. Before he was taken into the operating room, he sent a text to Marie, in his beloved Latin. “Noli timere,” it read. Don’t be afraid.
Heaney left behind three children — Michael, Christopher and Catherine — who, along with Marie, have chosen 25 of his unpublished poems to include in the new collected edition. They felt, they say in a foreword, “caution and trepidation” at sharing work he had not shared himself, but wanted to give readers “the delight of encountering these poems for the first time”. There are delights indeed, from a poem composed in 1964 about a visit to Yeats’s grave, to one written just a month before he died, about his evening walks with Marie in their later years.
The announcement of Heaney’s death was, O’Donoghue says, “one of those Kennedy moments”. Everyone remembers what they were doing. But when I ask him about the last time he saw Heaney, O’Donoghue takes on a sheepish look. “There hides a terrible tale,” he says.
Heaney and Marie had been in Oxford for a memorial service for a mutual friend, and O’Donoghue drove them back to the airport afterwards. “After a long tailback on the M25, and having had this bibulous lunch in Marston, I was extremely keen to go to the gents,” O’Donoghue explains. “So the last thing I said to Seamus was, ‘I’ve got to dash!’ And he said, ‘That’s a bad way to feel in these circumstances.’ That’s the last thing he said to me.” He laughs, then stops silent for a moment. “It’s ridiculous.”
I get the sense that after so much time spent with Heaney’s poems, the conclusion of the project means that O’Donoghue is mourning him all over again. “It was a marvellous kind of backdrop to life, really. It was kind of all I did for the last five years, but it was all I wanted to do. It was a fantastic privilege.”
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The typescript for Swallow is dated “27/2/10 Glanmore”, so Heaney wrote it in his Co Wicklow cottage three years before his death. But it recounts a visit, with Marie, to Pienza, a hill town in Tuscany, in July 1986.
Heaney wrote many poems set outside Ireland, which don’t receive as much attention as they should. But you can see his typical concerns at work here — even in a place as “phantasmagorical”, or dreamlike, as Pienza, Heaney’s focus is on the seemingly insignificant thing: a tiny bird. The swallow is, in this majestic landscape, a “little soul” worthy of attention, worthy of poetry.
The emphasis on the well is interesting, too. Heaney’s early poem Personal Helicon, about his childlike obsession with wells, explains why he is so drawn to poetry. Staring at himself in wells is now “beneath all adult dignity” but “I rhyme/ To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” That compulsion to write had followed him all the way to Italy.
Heaney changed line nine by hand after he finished typing up the poem, replacing the original “As from a balcony” with “Where, from the sheered off hill”. It’s a great example of his poetic intuition, replacing a human invention with the earthy reality beneath it. And isn’t “sheered off” wonderful? The sound of it makes you think of a sheep being sheared. Perhaps even in sunny Pienza, Heaney’s mind was never far from Mossbawn.
