[In the following essay, Allen traces the effect of American literature and culture on Heaney's poetry.]

“Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.” So wrote Larkin, who had left Ireland for England, “home,” in 1955. The implied aesthetic is akin to (and roughly contemporaneous with) Kavanagh's assumption that creative potential has its tap-root in the “parish” of one's deepest allegiance. But despite Kavanagh's importance for Seamus Heaney's art, such local attachments were no longer a crucial spur for Heaney's generation of Irish poets. When Longley, Mahon, and Heaney first read together in the mid-'60s (in Glengormley, Mahon's “home ground”), they were celebrating a poet, MacNeice, for whom all places were potentially elsewhere. Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke (as well as Ted Hughes) show, through their influence on Heaney's early work, that he was not immune to the stimulus of other “parishes” than rural, regional Ireland. And from his second book to his seventh, as we shall see, America's intermittent presence in Heaney's poetry alongside England and Ireland suggests that the verse is searching out some empathy and support there.

Vincent Buckley (in his Memory Ireland) and Dillon Johnston (in the Colby Quarterly) have illustrated how America has figured, in Johnston's phrase, “in the finances and poetic forms” of recent Irish poets. Two older writers for whom Heaney has a long-standing respect, Kinsella and Montague, may have offered him a precedent in seeking such support. It is significant that not just these three but almost all the writers cited by Johnston as attracting American patronage and achieving American audiences come from the Catholic/Nationalist tradition (south and north of the border); it was only for such writers that the prospect of a symbiotic relationship with American readers seemed realistic. They shared with many Americans an ideological distrust of the colonial power; moreover, Catholic Irish-Americans, the core of the diaspora for whom President Mary Robinson keeps a light in her window, had established a powerful and distinctive American subculture, equating Irishness for the wider American public with Catholicism and Nationalism. A premium was thus placed on a “green” Irish identity in American literary circles, and this identity may have been augmented by widespread Irish-American recruitment to the teaching and graduate study of Irish writing in the U.S. By 1983 (when Heaney's American reputation was really catching on) it was by no means only his Irish readers who would respond enthusiastically when he insisted in his Field Day pamphlet, “My passport's green.”

So it is not surprising that, apart from some stylistic indebtedness to Hart Crane, there is little American presence in the early poetry of Longley and Mahon. Whatever pan-Irish notions they might have picked up as students in Dublin, they were excluded at the outset from a Hiberno-American rapport by their Northern Protestant cultural antecedents. When the U.S. does figure in their later poems, it is merely as a place of exile or a launching pad for home. On the economic front, Mahon has recently entered Johnston's list of major recipients of American patronage and employment with a Lannan Foundation Award; but it is interesting that he does so at a time when he has changed his attitude towards Irish poetic locale, rejecting the Northern regionalism he was still displaying in a 1985 interview with Poetry Ireland in favour of the Dublin-centred literary nationalism he and Peter Fallon evince in their Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1989).

Heaney's way of broaching the possibility was from the first very different from that of Montague (who then provided the most notable example of poetic success—particularly in the Midwest—for an Irish poet in the U.S.). The latter writer, Brooklyn-born, uses America either autobiographically (as Dillon Johnston has shown) or else to emphasise his place in the cosmopolitan tradition of Irish poetry instituted by Denis Devlin and Thomas MacGreevy. California in a poem like “All Legendary Obstacles” functions very much as does Paris throughout A Chosen Light (1967)—to confirm the mobility and high-cultural credentials of the speaker. These tendencies are merely modified where the poetry is packaged in a more explicitly political way: on the back cover of The Rough Field (1972) the prestige of place is given a veneer of radicalism to link Paris, Northern Ireland, and 1968 Berkeley: “the New Road I describe runs through Normandy as well as Tyrone. And experience of agitations in Paris and Berkeley taught me that the violence of disputing factions is more than a local phenomenon.”

In contrast, Heaney has always resisted the cosmopolitan self-image. He tends to present himself as a humble worker-craftsman, whether as iconic poem-maker, autobiographical poet, critic, or man of letters. His first invocation of America, as he says in the essay “Feeling into Words,” grew out of assumptions about American literature and culture natural to a teacher of modern literature in higher education in the 1960s (though there is no doubt that they would have a special potency for an Irish writer of Heaney's tradition). The concept of the “American Dream” exemplified—for a teacher in Belfast in those days—by texts like The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman takes on a triple resonance in Heaney's work: the phrase is redolent of the emigrant experience (travelling west to the land of opportunity is a powerful idea for the Irish imagination); it accommodates the frontier experience (“Go West, young man”) that was rejuvenated in the '60s when space became the New Frontier (the moon landing occurred in the same year as the publication of Heaney's second book); and finally, these locational and spatial metaphors shade into the dream of upward mobility, of rags to riches, whereby every Irish-American boy can become president.

In the final poem of that second book (Door into the Dark) Heaney seems to be conveying Kavanagh's inward and “parochial” aesthetic to a potential American audience in frontier terms: “We have no prairies / To slice a big sun at evening,” he writes, and later in the same poem (“Bogland”), “Our pioneers keep striking / Inwards and downwards.” The key verbs here, “slice” and “striking,” display the ambiguity that the influence of '60s English poetry encouraged in Mahon and Longley as well as Heaney: the incipient violence is extended (in terms reminiscent of the “snug … gun” of “Digging”) so that the bog “keeps crusting / Between the sights of the sun” (my emphasis). The machismo of the “slightly aggravated young Catholic male” (as Heaney called his younger self in a 1977 interview with Seamus Deane) is here offering tribute to that code of manhood involved in the “winning” of the West (Heaney's own formulation, as we shall see later). In so far as the imagery resembles that of “Digging” (or “The Forge,” from which the book's title is taken), “Bogland” suggests that violent energies should be harnessed into a creative process of orgasmic potency that may be extrovert (America) or introvert (Ireland). It is revealing that Heaney counterpoints the (easily interpreted) “downward,” “wet,” “soft” qualities on the Irish side of the comparison with only the most pallid and clichéd alternatives on the American (as though he is saving the obvious binary opposites to attribute them to England at the end of the “Belfast” section of Preoccupations).

The poem is nevertheless more open to its transatlantic materials than its surface assertiveness would suggest. Its rudimentary plot follows the American settlers westward, with parallels to mid-Ireland at every point. “Our unfenced country” (my emphasis) is the bog; instead of the buffalo, “we” have “the Great Irish Elk”; instead of Nevada gold, “Butter sunk under” the bog is “recovered.” Finally, “waterlogged trunks / Of great firs” are dug up: “-logged” in its context hints at “logging,” and the geographic logic of the poem might point to California redwood. This narrator, despite the static Kavanagh aesthetic he claims to be promoting, has itchy feet. What is more, the speaker does not (perhaps for tactical reasons) insist that the crowded archaeology of forerunners he has inherited is preferable to the exploitable virgin land (conveniently empty of Native Americans) that his imagined New World shares with, for instance, the last pages of The Great Gatsby. As Heaney's speaker puts it in “Bogland,” “Every layer [our pioneers] strip / Seems camped on before.” But there is no way of getting him onto the western trail he surreptitiously hankers after; the first stage of the emigrant's journey is missing. These submerged frustrations are to some extent accommodated in the hope that “The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.” The poem is hinting that commitment to a regional and local culture need not preclude alien modes of apprehension, a culture-flow from elsewhere.

The heretofore missing strand in Heaney's version of the American Dream, the emigrant strand, opens up in the final poem of Wintering Out (1972), his third book. The speaker of “Westering: In California” is on his way to a residency at Berkeley, and the style of the poem, under the influence of Gary Snyder, is relaxed, narrative and associative rather than cryptically linguistic. The opening lines intimate the larger imaginative dimensions of the journey through the suggestion, in the word “Official,” that the moon is now American territory, won as the West was. Where the infatuated speaker's poetic trek began, how far he has come (in achievement) since his first “parochial” success—with the frogs of “Death of a Naturalist”—is also accommodated:

I sit under Rand McNally's
“Official Map of the Moon”—
The colour of frogskin,
Its enlarged pores held
Open …

What have been left behind on this revelatory journey are the reduced local circumstances of rural Ulster, so dilute in comparison to the present experience that what illuminated the earlier scene hardly seems the same moon:

                                                                                my shadow
Neat upon the whitewash
From her bony shine,
The cobbles of the yard
Lit pale as eggs.

When he looks back from this new point of vantage, only a “shadow” is left to represent the poet. There is a studied reference in the last two lines here to an earlier page of the collection and to the yard where the “Servant Boy,” in what was probably Heaney's last unconditional celebration of the Kavanagh aesthetic, came “resentful / and impenitent, / carrying the warm eggs” (emblems of parochially derived poems).

The road to Shannon, embarkation point for the American West Coast airport where the poem is set, passes through middle Ireland, Kavanagh country, a now “empty amphitheatre”; and the travellers on that road seem to leave behind the repression central to mid-Irish culture: “congregations bent / To the studded crucifix.” (I say “seem” because the point of view of the “congregations” is also represented: “we drove by, / a dwindling interruption.”) The inward pioneering I've argued for in “Bogland” has been replaced by a more extrovert journey that seems to envisage with gusto the dropping away of the Irish Catholic heritage of suffering and repression: “[W]hat nails dropped out that hour?” asks the speaker, patently identifying his own “rooted” predicament with that of the figure on the studded cross. By the end of the poem, however, it is clear which nails have not dropped out. Euphorically the speaker can “imagine untroubled dust, / A loosening gravity”: can see the degree of his freedom from the inturned and rooted Kavanagh aesthetic in terms of the moon as destination. But he (and Jesus) are still only foot-loose: the hands (“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests,” as the early poem “Digging” proclaimed) are still under coercion. Indeed, the apparently colonised moon of the airport map itself bears the stigmata, and it suddenly seems possible that, like the Jutland traveller earlier in the volume (“The Tollund Man”), this westward, moonward voyager may find himself “lost, / Unhappy and at home.”

These irresolutions are unaddressed in the next book, North (1975), which concerns itself with Ireland in its European historical context and with the Northern Irish issue. But the kind of North American support and attention that Buckley and Johnston see as available can be read as a subtext to the subsequent development of Heaney's verse. This is apparent at the most basic level in the fact that American journals and publishers bulk much larger in the acknowledgements of his volumes from Field Work (1979) on than they did in North. Poetry in the mid-'70s was becoming less iconic, ever more an extension or equivalent of autobiography, and in a poem addressed to Deane in North (published as Heaney prepared to take up an academic post in Dublin), the year in California is given a retrospective aura of intellectual glamour:

                    Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.
Here's two on's are sophisticated,
Dabbling in verses till they have become
A life …

(“Singing School”)

Field Work looks both back and forward. The dedication of the “Glanmore Sonnets” (to “Ann Saddlemyer, our heartiest welcomer”) is a tribute to the way that (Canadian) scholar made a workplace in Wicklow available to the poet in the three years after he gave up his previous academic post in Belfast. And Heaney's “Elegy” for Robert Lowell in the volume implicitly recognises that the route to a New England sphere of influence and a ready audience (at Harvard) for his learning and his poetry were opened up in his mind through his friendship with that poet.

It's easy to see the allure of these transatlantic circumstances; the situation he could envision for himself in the U.S. must have seemed unproblematic compared with the irreconcilable tensions of the Irish situation. Wintering Out (1972), despite its recognition of the need to “uproot” (“A Northern Hoard”), was a collection powerfully committed to the imaginative resources of its region, scrupulous in its ecumenical goodwill; but this did not mean that Heaney, as a liberal nationalist, could respond positively when one of the two Protestant dedicates of that book, Michael Longley, invited him, in a verse letter published a year later, to share the benefits of the Act of Union. On the other hand, North openly committed itself to a liberal nationalist agenda, and two years later Seamus Deane, the dedicatee of the book's central statement of literary fraternity, “Singing School,” was demanding in an interview with his former schoolmate in Crane Bag that Heaney adopt a more radical nationalist position. Such pressures seemed to imply two alternatives: alignment with the “Northern Irish ‘Renaissance’” (as it was later to be represented by Morrison and Motion's Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry) or with the radically nationalist Deane centred Irish groupings that energised Crane Bag and Field Day. The Kavanagh parochial aesthetic (essentially apolitical, as Heaney noted in his essay “The Sense of Place”) offered one way of temporising with these extremes. The American option provided another, a kind of adjustable counterweight to either or both of the opposed cultural imperatives that haunt the prose and verse of the time.

In “Elegy” (for Robert Lowell) we see the American poet's influence at both intertextual and autobiographical levels, launching the speaker on his most substantive westward journey yet; “fear of water” pales into insignificance beside the verse's euphoric response to the rhetoric of the “Dream”:

As you swayed the talk
and rode on the swaying tiller
of yourself, ribbing me
about my fear of water,
what was not within your empery?
You drank America
like the heart's
iron vodka …

The word America functions here with the enigmatic, liturgical force it always carries in the literature of the Dream (at the end of The Adventures of Augie March, for instance). So advocated, and by such an inspiring patron, the potential journey of the emigrant was made to seem no more terrifying than the familiar (cf. Mahon's Night-Crossing) archipelagic crossing in the opposite direction, from Belfast to Liverpool:

                    You were out night ferry
thudding in a big sea,
the whole craft ringing
with an armourer's music
the course set wilfully across
the ungovernable and dangerous. …

The implication is still that violent energies are to be harnessed and that the courage and determination that might be required of a “slightly aggravated young Catholic male” on the home front are also required on the westward journey. Heaney could valorise the quasi-emigrant entrepreneurial impulse because professional success for the Northern Catholic has political significance. It represents a triumph for the liberal (non-violent) nationalist cause by demonstrating within the Catholic community that social and economic advantage can be gained in the North in peaceable and constitutional, rather than revolutionary, ways.

Heaney's next book, Station Island (1984), seems to take several steps backwards (a frequent strategy for him), relocating the vocational quest (wherein the protagonist is allowed a childlike earnestness) among the penitential rituals of middle Ireland out of which Kavanagh had fashioned Lough Derg. It is not surprising, however, if one looks back to “Westering,” to find Irish/American cultural tensions dramatised in a key poem. There is a conflict of loyalties for the poet-speaker of “Making Strange” between the embarrassed incoherence of his County Derry farmer father and the sophistication of a literary visitor from America, Louis Simpson. Just as Lowell was an important influence on Heaney both as stylistic innovator and as inspiring friend, Simpson too has a dual appeal: he provides, in poems like “American Poetry” and “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain,” a distinctive American idiom against which Heaney can play off his own style; and because America was his adopted country (Simpson having been born in Jamaica), Simpson offered Heaney a possible alter ego in his quasi-emigrant quest.

The speaker in “Making Strange” is initially paralysed by the need to introduce “the one with his travelled intelligence” to “another” (his father) and to his parish, to “these eyes and puddles and stones.” The poem is an uneasy blend of the iconic and the autobiographical, and in an improbable mode directly inherited from Kavanagh's “Temptation in Harvest,” a “cunning middle voice” comes out of “the field across the road,” urging the speaker on the one hand to “Be adept and be dialect, / tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut” (i.e., continue to capitalise on the parochial) and on the other hand to “love the cut of this travelled one” (a poetic equal this time rather than a genial patron like Lowell). At first sight Heaney might seem to be indulging in the kind of aestheticised cosmopolitanism one sometimes finds in Montague. But the naivety with which he characterises his speaker is balanced through adjective and simile with elements of the noble savage in the American visitor: “[his] tawny containment, / his speech like the twang of a bowstring.” The speaker's first need in realising their potential equality is (as in “Elegy”) for courage to transcend the tried parochial aesthetic. As the Muse says:

Go beyond what's reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were
when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.

The “making strange” (which phrase, in an Irish family, would describe a child behaving peculiarly in the presence of a stranger) is changed here in implication: it indicates the way the company of an outsider can make even one's most familiar surroundings seem alien.

I found myself driving the stranger
through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at that same recitation.

The materials of the poetry may still be “my own country,” “all that I knew” (as in “The Forge”: “All I know is …”), but access on equal terms to a new audience (of which Simpson is here representative) is recognised as necessary to produce new “departures,” an adjusted aesthetic.

This adjustment had been in process from about 1979, when Heaney began teaching creative writing at Harvard for one semester a year (spending the rest of his time in Ireland). He was publishing widely in American journals and at once cementing literary relationships and confirming a New England audience through his association as contributor and then guest editor of a New England magazine, Ploughshares. In 1984 he became Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard and presented there, as his Phi Beta Kappa offering, the poem “Alphabets” (later to appear in The Haw Lantern, 1987). At the centre of the poem, treated with some irony, stands the prospective Boylston Professor: “The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O. / He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.”

The first sentence, despite the irony, is not entirely free from portentousness. It encapsulates both the speaker's westward journey from the County Derry “parish” of the earlier poetry and his journey in time from an education at the hands of a teacher who is recognisably “Miss Walls” of “Death of a Naturalist.” As in “Westering,” the image of the moon journey enhances the speaker's vertiginous sense of the spatial and social remove from County Derry farmyard to Harvard lecture hall:

                                                  As from his small window
The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,
The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O
Like a magnified and buoyant ovum—
Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable …

But the “parish” as a reservoir of mimetic possibilities (which made Heaney modify rather than jettison the Kavanagh aesthetic in “Making Strange”) is now seen as an anachronism:

Time has bulldozed the school and school window.
Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves
Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest
And the delta face of each potato pit
Was patted straight and moulded against frost.
All gone …

Interestingly, with the “parish” gone, the idea of an American elsewhere ceases to be pressing. Implicit and exemplified in these lines is the shift to the nonmimetic and self-reflexive aesthetic that governs Heaney's recent poetry. It is as though the poet has here lifted out a strand in his own development, contemplated it, refocused it, and turned from the subject entirely.

About this time, one of Vincent Buckley's informants found the opinion common back in Ireland that Heaney was “not an Irish poet; he's a Yank now.” Buckley himself formulated a contrary but equally unsubstantiated view that Heaney, like other Irish poets, was exploiting in America his “native” Irishness to achieve a social elevation comparable with that from working class to upper middle class. In 1986 Terence Brown suggested in Poetry Ireland that Buckley's thesis (that the complex fate of such Irish poets as Heaney and Montague was “not to become Americans but to be Irish in relation to America”) deserved exploration. But Buckley's notion probably reflects little more than a knee-jerk response to reports like this from the U.S. Information Service's international magazine Dialogue:

It was a pleasure, too, last spring, to join the annual dinner of the Signet Society, a 116-year-old club for undergraduates and professors. The guests sat back at their tables in the Faculty Club—pale faces, red faces, elegant shocks of white hair, the half-childlike faces of adolescents, a colorful punk hairdo or two, and everyone in evening clothes—and listened silently to a string trio of superb undergraduate musicians.

Later, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, recited some of his verses, which sounded as if Yeats had come back to life; and then Helen Vendler, a professor of English, told everyone what Heaney meant. At one point, a great silver bowl of champagne went around the room, and hundreds of people sipped from it. And still later, at the Signet's clubhouse, the undergraduates got intelligently rowdy. They obviously felt, as such undergraduates do, that they were special, as they were.

And Heaney spoke the first lines of his poem on Harvard:

A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard.
The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

My own interest here is in how the passage from an (uncollected) poem recited in such circumstances shows Heaney in the American '80s (when the concept of the Dream had been transformed by the sense of America as a mosaic, an aggregation of coequal and hyphenated groupings) still tying together westward journey, technological advance, and (by implication) upward mobility in a way conceived of in Ireland nearly twenty years earlier.

Foremost among the creative benefits to him of the ongoing American experience (Heaney said in 1987) was the achievement of “a certain distance from your first self.” Heaney has argued further that this is particularly necessary for a Northern Irish poet (which is clearly how he still sees himself). It is interesting that Paul Muldoon, a younger Northern Irish poet now resident in the U.S., dedicates to Heaney a prefatory poem to his deconstructive version of the American Dream, Madoc (1990). In it a bustling, expatriate Muldoon, crossing New York, nearly loses his eelskin briefcase (my italics) and the poem inside it. The briefcase symbolises the desire for upward mobility as patently as does the one in Ellison's Invisible Man; its sudden, “supple” impulse to “strike out” for “the ‘open’ sea” by way of the East River, however, serves (like a great deal of sly intertextuality in the volume) to relate Muldoon to a poetic precursor who was also his predecessor on the transatlantic route. Muldoon, after all, began “parochially,” writing out of his “own little postage stamp” of County Armagh (though it has to be said that it was from the start sometimes tinctured, unaccountably, with American images and mores). His career, from rural beginnings to university in Belfast to Faber/Farrar, Straus & Giroux publication to employment by American universities, has closely paralleled Heaney's.

The eel to which our attention is being drawn appears in Heaney's “Beyond Sargasso” (1969) and has a homing instinct that leads it inevitably back to Lough Neagh, a landmark of the poet's “parish”:

                                        he drifted
into motion half-way
across the Atlantic,
sure as the satellite's
insinuating pull
in the ocean, as true
to his orbit.

The eel appears again in Station Island to suggest a parochial colouring to the “signatures of your own frequency” that the poet hopes to transmit: “elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.” Muldoon, while sharing with Heaney a readiness to reverse the upward and westward direction of the “Dream,” is eager to register his vote (in characteristically oblique fashion) against the inexorable pull of any parish: hence the force—given by the emphatic syntax, its final position in the poem, and its intertextual quotation marks—to “the ‘open’ sea.”

THE BRIEFCASE FOR SEAMUS HEANEY

I held the briefcase at arm's length from me;
the oxblood or liver
eelskin with which it was covered
had suddenly grown supple.
I'd been waiting in line for the cross-town
bus when an almighty cloudburst
left the sidewalk a raging torrent.
And though it contained only the first
inkling of this poem, I knew I daren't
set the briefcase down
to slap my pockets for an obol—
for fear it might slink into a culvert
and strike out along the East River
for the sea. By which I mean the “open” sea.