Memories of Dying: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Extract

Clive James, reviewing Seamus Heaney’s third collection, remarked: ‘Soon people are going to start comparing him with Yeats’. Which was characteristic of James, since he didn’t actually make the comparison but could claim first credit for it if necessary. C. B. Cox, reviewing the second collection, was less circumspect: ‘Major poets are as rare as the phoenix, and it is possible that since 1960 only one has emerged in these Islands. He is Seamus Heaney’. In the first Annual Yeats Lecture, in 1940, T. S. Eliot offered a variation on his own attempt to define the difference between a ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poet:

Where there is the continuity of such a positive personality and such a single purpose, the later work cannot be understood, or properly enjoyed, without a study and appreciation of the earlier; and the later work again reflects light upon the earlier, and shows us beauty and significance not before perceived.

This emphasis on the notion that ‘a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it’ (Eliot, ‘What is Minor Poetry?’) is peculiarly apposite to Yeats—at least in Yeats’s own view, since, despite Leavis’s contrary judgement, Yeats intended his Collected Poems to be read together and ordered the poems accordingly: each was to find its place within the pattern of the whole. If we compare Heaney with Yeats at all, this might be a starting-point since a similar patterning intention seems to be at work in at least three of his collections so far. It is an overall pattern in Heaney’s poetry that I want to present—which precludes any very close commentary on individual poems.