I know of no other major poet who has written as often about eels as Seamus Heaney. Take the poem “A Lough Neagh Sequence” from his second book, Door Into the Dark (1969), in which “each eel

Comes aboard to this welcome: The hook left in gill or gum, It’s slapped into the barrel numb

But knits itself, four-ply With the furling, slippy Haul, a knot of back and pewter belly

That stays continuously one For each catch the fling in Is sucked home like lubrication.

Percussive alliteration (“gill or gum”) and torquing enjambment are massaged into neat triple rhymes and trimeter, a wildness coiled into form. Sonically sticky language seems to animate the thing it describes. For Heaney, anything is liable to become an eel. The spine of the Grauballe Man, one of the famous bog bodies that appears in his collection North (1975), is “an eel arrested / under a glisten of mud.” Even far from home, Heaney feels “full of life as an eel / In a gurgly grating somewhere in east Manhattan // silvering, elvering off . . .” He reminds us that we’re always surrounded by—and even contain—the slipperiness of the real.

Heaney’s poetry testifies to the human desire to bind language to the material world. His famously thick onomatopoeia, the “squelch and slap” and “chug and slug” for which he has been celebrated (and occasionally mocked), is one of his primary tools. In a piece about Heaney’s translation of Beowulf (1999), the critic Terry Eagleton dissented, writing that “the celebrated ‘materiality’ of a poet like Heaney is really a linguistic trompe l’oeil, a psychological rather than ontological affair, a matter of association rather than incarnation.” In other words, “a kind of trick” that makes us feel something arbitrary (the sounds the mouth makes) is natural, an ideology of the given that forbids thinking otherwise. Still, it works on me.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited and with a commentary by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue (with Matthew Hollis), brings together Heaney’s 12 standalone volumes, along with a healthy portion of uncollected poems and a several-hundred-page commentary. New selections and outtakes might emerge, but such doorstops that gather dust on many a reader’s shelves are final monuments, stamped with scholarly authority. This monument reveals that, a decade after his death, Heaney’s work is more respected than fashionable. On rereading his verse now, what dominates is the sense of him as a fundamentally backward-facing poet. He was not averse to the present, but the glance over the shoulder—into his childhood, or further still, into the Viking history of Ireland—was his dynamo. He reached the height of his acclaim in the 1990s, with the Nobel Prize and the world’s attention turned to Ireland’s peace process; he ascended as the bard of a new liberal order (including a friendship with Bill Clinton, no less). This is not to criticize his work for exhibiting the “wrong” politics—an old critical saw—but rather to understand Heaney as the exemplary poet of a system that now seems to have a loosening grip on the world.

Quote: A decade after his death, Heaney’s work is more respected than fashionable. On rereading his verse now, what dominates is the sense of him as a fundamentally backward-facing poet.. Unquote.

Still, the pleasures of reading him are apparent to anyone who seeks him. And many have: before his death in 2013, it could be fairly argued that he was the biggest poet in the world, already safe in the pantheon. As the new volume’s introduction puts it, he was “a poet who sold a million books within a lifetime, while garnering the most prestigious accolade of all, the Nobel Prize in Literature.” A huge quantity of “beetle-sparkling” ink has been spilled over Heaney by critics and academics, not to mention the huge number of interviews he gave about his own work, to the point that he once drolly remarked he no longer believed he was born on a farm in Derry. It might seem there’s little left to say about his career. Yet, as we move forward in time and his work recedes, the land beneath the feet shifts.

The collected poems displays the evolution of Heaney’s poetic impulses. The apprentice work from the 1960s is already accomplished, if less clarified in its thought and more given over to the tug of spontaneous music. Influences are, inevitably, worn on the sleeve, as in the Hopkins-derived “October Thought,” which bursts into chiming assonance and alliteration: “Starling thatch watches, and sudden swallow / Straight shoots to its mud-nest, home-rest rafter, / Up through dry, dust-drunk cobwebs, like laughter”—a clue to the origin of the compound nouns that are constant in his work. Commentators note the Dylan Thomas influence in “Song of My Man-Alive” (“it was all tune-tumbling / Hill-happy and wine-wonderful”). Heaney was hyper-aware of his influences, even as he refined his relationship to them. Helen Vendler thinks of him as a poet of “second thoughts,” testing the same material again and again. In an essay about Thomas collected in The Redress of Poetry (1995), Heaney turns his eye to the fate of that’s poet reputation: “I want to ask which parts of his Collected Poems retain their force almost 40 years after his death. In the present climate of taste, his rhetorical surge and mythopoetic posture are unfashionable . . . which only makes it all the more urgent to ask if there is not still something we can isolate and celebrate in Dylan the Durable.”

Associating yourself with what has managed to survive is a kind of insurance for longevity. As Heaney’s style changed, the childhood countryside that grounds his poems remained, but accrued a more cultivated mythos. Some of the muckiness of the early work—the mud, the peat, the moldy squish of rotting blackberries—retreated in favor of smoother deliberation, something more befitting of an éminence grise. As Eagleton puts it, “the civic and the chthonic have always slogged it out” in Heaney’s poetry. And perhaps now the civility which lay like a film over the discourse of the late 20th century, the liberal consensus that allowed for democratic blandishments and for poets to receive medals in the Rose Garden, feels more elusive, another in illo tempore (“in the time of,” which begins many Latin sermons), to use another favorite Heaney phrase. It’s possible to think of Heaney as the perfect inoffensive Irishman, peace-loving and liberal, never too angry, a unifying mascot who could be elevated as the Good Friday Agreements, the peace accord that helped end the Troubles, were coming into place. This is surely a harsh judgment. But I tend to be drawn more toward the unsettled (if still elegant) earlier work, like “A Northen Hoard,” from *Wintering Out *(1972), which gives off a stronger whiff of animal spirits: “I’ve soaked by moonlight in tidal blood // A mandrake, lodged human fork, / Earth sac, limb of the dark; / And I wound its damp smelly loam / And stop my ears against the scream.”

Does being backward-facing mean being conservative, at least with a lowercase “c”? Although no one would call him avant-garde, Heaney’s remarkable facility with language puts any distinction between experiment and tradition to the test. In their introduction to the Poems, the editors point to his appreciation of “technique,” a term he contrasted with mere “craft.” Craft is what can be taught, but technique is to infuse the words with your own “stance towards life.” That stance was one of continuity and preservation. Heaney makes his allegiance to craft in the literal sense known everywhere; in the deployment of his intricate formalism, of course (examine the perfect slant rhymes of his “Glanmore Sonnets”), but also in subject matter, making portraits of basket weaving, blacksmithing, turf-cutting, thatching, bricklaying, and other trades. This transmutation from the hard labor of people in the world into the poet’s airy intellectual task is at the heart of Heaney’s vision. “Digging,” one of his most anthologized poems—and one he placed at the beginning of any selection in which it appeared—dramatizes this shift from the spade to the pen. Heaney recognized right away that his subject was a world already vanishing, and perhaps underlying these attentions was an anxiety that that world, soon to become digital, would never recover its relationship with the earth.

In his typically multi-directional way, Heaney was just as likely to dramatize his connection to the terrain through Greek mythology, as in his poems about Antaeus, the adversary of Hercules who could only be defeated by being lifted and separated from the soil:

When I lie on the ground I rise flushed as a rose in the morning. In fights I arrange a fall on the ring To rub myself with sand

That is operative As an elixir. I cannot be weaned Off the earth’s long contour, her river veins.

[…]

He may well throw me and renew my birth But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth My elevation, my fall.

Some of Heaney’s best and most famous poems (like this one, though it was written earlier) arrived in North, the collection that made him a star. Being a complete poet of the land means remembering the people who lived there long before you. In poems about the preserved bodies discovered in Northern European peat bogs, such as the above-mentioned Grauballe Man, and in “Punishment,” about a woman supposedly executed for adultery, Heaney’s language crackles with precision. He uses short, tight lines to accentuate the violence of the encounter: “I am the artful voyeur // of your brain’s exposed / and darkened combs, / your muscles’ webbing / and all your numbered bones.” A corpse is the ultimate human materiality, the artifact of what we were and always have been. Some critics read these poems as Heaney’s retreat from political commitment, embracing instead a more abstract notion of violence as inevitable. There may be some truth in that: violence often becomes less visceral and more aesthetic the further we are from it—reaching all the way back to The Iliad. But Heaney’s retrospective gaze is also an act of fidelity: a way of learning to see first, and then to recover pain across time.

Quote: Heaney recognized right away that his subject was a world already vanishing, and perhaps underlying these attentions was an anxiety that that world, soon to become digital, would never recover its relationship with the earth.. Unquote.

This belief in the continuity of things applied not just to history exuded from the land, but to poetic tradition. Heaney’s humble origins and subject matter are always being grafted to the trunk of literary history. His erudition is rarely showy and stretches beyond his much-praised translations of Beowulf, Virgil, Sophocles, and other ancestors. John Keats and William Wordsworth, Rainer Maria Rilke and Osip Mandelstam, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell—they’re all traceable in his work, particularly in the elegies to fellow poets that became a fixture of his late output. But it’s hard to see much anxiety of influence—Heaney’s voice emerged confidently from the beginning. As he grew older, his ambitions grew accordingly, culminating in Station Island (1984), whose long title poem is a pilgrimage-conversation with Dante’s Purgatorio and, in Dantesque fashion, his most sustained attempt to engage with the politics of his time. As befitting the purgatorial spirit, it is a poem of penance, in which he castigates himself for quietism. “I have no mettle for the angry role,” he writes to one of the shades he encounters, even as he recounts the parades of Protestant Orangemen who menaced his Irish-Catholic childhood in Northern Ireland. Typically self-aware, he criticizes himself before others can.

With Station Island, Heaney’s style settled into a more assured form as he relaxed some of his earlier linguistic workouts. Another long poem, the sequence “Squarings” from Seeing Things (1991), stands as a testament to the full integration of his poetic powers. A mosaic of thought, reference, and memory, “Squarings” compresses everything into the same triple stanza of quatrains—a humble container for Heaney’s technique. Though some poets still write in rhyme and meter, it seems unlikely to return as the dominant current of contemporary poetry. Heaney is acutely aware of this passing, which he treats as an analogue to the vanishing rhythms of everyday life. In one section, he describes the sound and feel of a latch snapping open and shut, a clear metaphor for the formal control of which he remains a master:

Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch. Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift And drop and innocent harshness.

Which is a music of binding and of loosing Unheard in this generation, but there to be Called up or called down at a touch renewed.

Once the latch pronounces, roof Is original again, threshold fatal, The sanction powerful as the foreboding.

Your footstep is already known, so bow Just a little, raise your right hand, Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.

That the old music is “there to be / Called up or called down at a touch renewed” is an indicator of Heaney’s long view of poetry. The sacred tools never really go away. They are instead a renewable resource, something to assist the adventurous as they enter into the unknown, past or future.

Still, it could be said that Heaney lacks a true future imaginary. A helicopter or a CD may occasionally puncture the mythic atmosphere—not to locate us firmly in the present, but to remind us that we’re not in the 1950s, or 250 B.C., either. At times, these moments feel less like ruptures and more like acknowledgments: subtle signals that Heaney knows we know where his allegiances lie. In “The Mud Vision,” from The Haw Lantern (1987), he turns to a more archetypal mode. The poem recalls Robert Frost’s “Directive,” another work in which a nature poet grapples with the strange intrusions of the contemporary world, and it captures a similar sense of alienation:

As cameras rake The site from every angle, experts Began their post factum jabber and all of us Crowded in tight for the big explanations. Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours, Our one chance to know incomparable And dive to a future. What might have been origin We dissipated in news. The clarified place Had retrieved neither us nor itself – except You could say we survived.

Survival as a poet also means the construction of a personality on the page. Heaney was never confessional, although the influence of a writer like Lowell (with whom he was friends) runs through his work. In “Pit Stop Near Castletown,” an intriguing uncollected poem first published in 2003, Heaney recollects stopping by the roadside on a car trip with Lowell and “pissing like men / together and apart against the wall.” Perhaps there was something too overt about this mingling of streams to merit inclusion in a collection. Still, Heaney wrote extensively about his personal life, albeit obliquely. His distance within intimacy, his seeming aloofness, is a distinguishing feature of his work. In his romantic poetry, there is often a sense of sexless eroticism, even perhaps obligation, in order not to seem too much a museum piece himself. It’s as if he’s casting about for an interesting turn of phrase, a technician playing with his tools. Reading lines like “I have begun to pace / the Hadrian’s Wall / of her shoulder,” one feels he is ready rather quickly to transform a woman’s body back into that ever-present landscape.

Heaney had a remarkable gift for self-curation. “I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself, / A shadow on raked gravel // In front of my house of life” he writes in “The Blackbird of Glanmore,” from District and Circle (2006). It’s not for nothing that two of his collections—*The Spirit Level *(1996) and District and Circle—are dedicated to literary critics, Helen Vendler and Ann Saddlemyer respectively. He largely seems to have known what to keep in and out of his books, though there are a few lovely outtakes, such as “Baptism,” written around the time of the poems from Wintering Out, ringing clean with simple couplets (“I came from water through the hoop of bone / Into this cold pool in the womb of stone”). Still, there are no hidden masterpieces. In the uncollected poems gathered here, a large number are what we might call light verse. Heaney is not usually a humorous poet, beyond a certain wry irony that insulates his better poems from an excess of self-seriousness. But they are a great poet’s doggerel, occasional toasts and graduation poems and literary gripes and private jokes. These poems amuse at times, if in a you-had-to-be-there sort of way, but every once and a while they rise above occasion. Take, for instance, “Verses for a Fordham Commencement,” considerably longer and more engaged than a similar speech written for Harvard students around the same time in 1982; perhaps Heaney felt some affinity with less aristocratic aspirations. Though he was often articulate about questions of poetry and social commitment in his prose, it’s rare to see it made so plain in verse:

Or is not a misalliance, Ivory towers in a world of violence and corporate money. Are college walls perhaps a door Shut on workers and the poor While the privileged and the few ignore The unwashed many?

It’s compelling to imagine a Heaney who wanted to quarrel more openly with the world in his poetry. Perhaps he simply had the self-knowledge to stay within his strengths. The door was so easily shut on someone from his background, yet he escaped, carrying with him all the slimy, sludgy particulars of his origins. To look backwards with clarity was, in itself, an achievement. So many poets today struggle for such focus, caught in the anxiety of riding the wave of a technological, dispersed present. He remains, above all, the poet of one of his great sonnets, “The Forge”: “All I know is a door into the dark.” Inside that door—now harder than ever to enter—is the anvil, “Horned as a unicorn”: a hard labor of creation, as nearly impossible as it is essential.

David Schurman Wallace is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, the Baffler, and other publications.

Read Full Biography