Chapter 4 - America

Summary

This chapter reads Heaney’s relationship to America through the notions of place and the writer’s identity developed in his prose, as well as his evolving poetics. It shows how a youthful sense of transatlantic competition matures, with his early visits, into a deep ambivalence about the freedoms and opportunities America affords. America leaves only the faintest impress on the poetry of Wintering Out, the volume composed during his year as visiting lecturer at Berkeley, and distance from home weighs heavily. The political climate in San Francisco, however, and the creative responses it aroused, guide Heaney in the poetic forms and mytho-historical thinking that define North, his most coherent response to the Northern Irish Troubles. Heaney’s public remarks on American poetry and society, and his relationship with Robert Lowell in particular, show a gradual coming round to the loose forms, 'talkiness', and buoyant hybridity that he sees as the poetic articulation of the American experience.