[Hart is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, his introduction to Seamus Heaney, he examines Heaney's development as a poet, focusing on his position in—and his reactions to—Ireland's literary and political history.]

Few twentieth-century poets writing in English have been able to secure a wide audience among general readers and critics alike. After W. B. Yeats, only Robert Frost achieved such bipartisan acclaim, although for many years scholars denigrated Frost beside the intellectually more sophisticated modernists. In a culture where films, television shows, and compact discs have usurped the monopoly on communication that books once enjoyed, a popular poet is rare. Maintaining an "international reputation," as a writer in The Observer recently commented, "is a tricky business…. It takes a special gift to win hearts on both sides of the Atlantic and no one now possesses it quite like Seamus Heaney" [21 June 1987, p. 7]. With the publication of each new volume, the critical consensus grows that Heaney is not only the most gifted poet in Ireland and Britain, but also the most critically respected poet writing in English today.

The anonymous Observer writer, echoing claims made by Robert Lowell, Helen Vendler, and Harold Bloom, entitled his article "Poet Wearing the Mantle of Yeats" and mischievously drew attention to those among the Irish who "suspect he's already a better poet than Yeats." Mantles obfuscate as well as illuminate, and Yeats's mantle on Heaney is both burden and honor. As Heaney's readers and critics proliferate, so do his different mantles—his different masks and identities—and so do the conflicting appraisals of his work. Those who suspect that Heaney's popularity lies in the common demand for one Irish bard per generation argue that he is a minor Dylan Thomas whose talent as a poetic "ornamentalist" with "a fine way with language" lacks substance [see A. Alvarez, "A Fine Way with the Language," New York Review of Books, 6 March 1980, pp. 16-17]. For others he is a pastoralist whose homely portraits of rural Irish life attract both curiosity and sympathy but are ultimately sentimental. Others believe his appeal arises from his position as political spokesman for Northern Ireland's perpetual Troubles, while those in the opposite camp claim that his poetry amounts to a culpable escape from those Troubles. For some he writes a romantic poetry of transcendence, for others a classic one of principled social engagement. With regard to the Catholic religion in which he was reared, some say his poetry is still regressively steeped in sacrificial symbols and rituals; others declare that, like James Joyce, he has flown above the nets of religion for a more objective anthropological view. For those critics who demand allegories from their writers Heaney obliges by making his poems speak for religious, political, linguistic, sexual, and literary matters all at once. For those who believe allegory is mechanical and simplistic, bastardizing rather than legitimately representing history, Heaney is just the latest mythmaker in a long line of Irish mystifiers.

His complexity, understandably, leads to debate about what he stands for, what kind of poet he really is, and whether the ethical and aesthetic standards exemplified in his verse are meritorious or meretricious. He is so elusive, in fact, that while his wife can attest to his "magical ring of confidence" and his sense of security which, to her, is "like an egg contained within a shell, without any quality of otherness, without the sense of loss that this otherness brings" [see Polly Devlin, All of Us There, 1983, pp. 16-17] other less intimate observers declare that the personality behind the poems is wracked with anxiety, uncertainty, fear, anger, and painful self-consciousness. Heaney may not like wearing Yeats's mantle. Nevertheless, his poetry vacillates between antinomies as persistently as his precursor's. Like the Irish history that saturates it from beginning to end, his poetry is a battleground of competing affiliations. In a passage Heaney likes to quote from Yeats, and one that applies to much of his own work, his countryman remarked: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty" [Mythologies, 1959, p. 331]. Yet for Heaney poetry and rhetoric, art and politics, are entangled rather than distinct, merging and emerging as rhythmically as the uncertainty that underlies them.

At the root of his work is a multifaceted argument with himself, with others, with sectarian Northern Ireland, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, and with his Roman Catholic, nationalist upbringing on a farm in County Derry. As he follows Yeats in striving for "unity of being," mapping out the embattled factions in his nation and psyche, he is descriptive as well as prescriptive. He diagnoses Irish ills, suggests cures (like dismantling his country's archaic hierarchies so that different religious and political groups can engage creatively rather than murderously), then withdraws to let legislators and law enforcers put the plan into practice. He realizes his agenda may be utopian and that his personal renunciation of overt political action may be taken as a cop-out (at least by "the noisy set / Of bankers, school-masters, and clergymen / The martyrs call the world" in Yeats's "Adam's Curse" [in The Poems, 1983, p. 80]). Nevertheless, he stands by the artist's right to choose one devotion over another. With Stephen Dedalus he will "forge the uncreated conscience of his race" [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916] in art rather than in government, although the blueprint for better governance will be scored into his poems for anybody to examine.

Behind Heaney's noble principles, however, is the worry that, as W. H. Auden proclaimed, "poetry makes nothing happen," that "it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper" [Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden, 1971, p. 53], that art rather than reform only exacerbates the dominant authorities. So Heaney's poems, to borrow current critical terms, are assiduously self-reflexive, self-consuming, self-deconstructing. They search for images and answers for Irish problems and submit them to intense critical scrutiny. What they set up they tend to knock down. Deploying a different metaphor, Heaney likes to quote Robert Frost on this process of composition by decomposition: "like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." Similarly, "the poem … a linguistic exploration whose tracks melt as it maps its own progress" [Preoccupations, pp. 80-1]. The moral value of this poetry that vigilantly investigates cultural dilemmas but then dissolves its solutions and that deconstructs the ancient hierarchies and oedipal struggles between "patriarchal" British Protestants and "matriarchal" Irish Catholics bothers Heaney because it fails to articulate concrete political resolutions for Ireland. Of Yeats, Auden elegiacally commented in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry" [Selected Poetry, p. 53]. Looking back on his career, which gained momentum during the Catholic civil rights movement in the sixties and the resurgence of I.R.A. attacks and Protestant counterattacks in the early seventies, Heaney intimates that if "Mad Ireland" had hurt him into politics he would feel less anxious. Politics, for better or for worse, makes things happen.

This kind of argument in which opposite views compel and repel Heaney with equal force begins with his first book, Death of a Naturalist. Here and in some of the uncollected poems printed when he was a student at Queen's University in Belfast he expresses a bittersweet nostalgia for his childhood on the farm in Derry. As in the pastoral tradition that stretches from Frost and Dylan Thomas (two of Heaney's early models) back to Virgil and Theocritus, Heaney depicts his rural, agrarian home ground as his golden age or Eden. As soon as pastoral enchantment wells up in him, however, he represses it with grim recognitions of farming in Ireland and the sectarian battles erupting or about to erupt just outside the farms' ditches and hedges. As he struggles to free himself from Mother Ireland's womblike pastures and reconcile himself with the historical facts of Father Britain's depredations, Heaney imagines himself as both an Adam falling from Eden into a knowledge of agonizing divisions and an oedipal child contending with both biological and cultural parents. His quest for fatherhood and poethood travels a dialectical path between pastoral and antipastoral traditions. Although he elegizes his early, innocent naturalism, which is traditional pastoralism thinly disguised, its death prepares the way for a more mature naturalism in tune with the struggles raging all around him.

Without the recognition of rural hardship, Heaney's poetry of agrarian ways would have floundered in the mists of another Celtic Twilight. Similarly, his meditational via negativas in Door into the Dark would have seemed solipsistic or narcissistic if they did not illuminate the psychological motives and consequences of meditation. While Heaney draws on the sort of Catholic meditation institutionalized by such divines as St. Ignatius Loyola and St. John of the Cross and updated for him by Evelyn Underhill and Thomas Merton, and while he sympathetically records sacred moments in the mystic's "dark night" (the altarlike anvil wreathed with sparks in "The Forge," the grass flaming in "In Gallarus Oratory"), his spiritual marriages are between imagination and unconscious rather than soul and Christ. His argumentative and iconoclastic way is to counter orthodox Catholic meditations by emphasizing their secular correlatives. As poetry replaces religion, Heaney demystifies the divine Word by transforming it into the poetic word. If Platonic and Judeo-Christian tradition has tended to denigrate writing as a cumbersome, improper medium for communicating sacred mysteries, Heaney, like his poststructuralist peers, contradicts that bias by deploying writing as a principal way to excavate the ground from which mysteries and prejudices have always burgeoned.

Realizing that pastoralism and mysticism have flourished primarily because of linguistic conventions and their power to evade or transcend the real world's troubles, Heaney in Wintering Out plunges even more methodically into language in order to expose its collusions with those troubles. In his poems on Northern Irish place names, etymology recapitulates history. An archaeologist of language, Heaney unearths signs of Scottish and English invasions lingering in the lexicon and pronunciation of his Irish compatriots. Focusing on British words transported to Ulster by colonizers and often fused with native Gaelic words, Heaney devises miniature allegories in which even the different syllables radiate political, religious, literary, and sexual significance. As he composed these poems, Heaney felt increasing pressure from the Catholic, nationalist community in his homeland to act as its propagandist. Yet his poems subvert partisan jingoism and strive to fashion in its place new emblems of sectarian cooperation.

As the bombs began to explode once again in the early seventies in Northern Ireland, Heaney responded with North, his most gruesome account of the tragic and mythical aspects of the sectarian hostilities. Some critics accused him of wallowing in rituals of sacrificial purgation and sexual renewal, as if he were emulating Yeats's more bellicose moods. Rather than clamber after the apocalyptic rapacity of Yeats's Zeus or Jehovah, Heaney typically identifies with and elegiacally mourns the victims of such myths. He repeatedly invokes ancient fertility cults and apocalyptic expectations to implicate them in the apocalyptic atrocities that have afflicted his country for centuries. Because Protestant and Catholic paramilitary groups shed blood in order to preserve their sacred ideals of Mother Ireland, she emerges more as a femme fatale or "terrible beauty" than as a benevolent fertility goddess. Heaney understands the devotion to the Mother among Catholics and the I.R.A., and sympathizes with their anger over her repeated desecration at the hands of Britain's Protestant Fathers. Still, he hopes for an oedipal resolution that is as political as it is psychological. To move toward civilized compromise, he suggests, both sides must realize that Ireland can be an old sow that eats her farrow, a tyrannical patriarch devouring sow and piglets alike, and also the androgynous, ecumenical humanist envisioned by Joyce in Leopold Bloom.

Heaney's year at Berkeley between 1970 and 1971 reinforced his liberal sentiments and loosened his early formalist constraints. In California he tried to incorporate the expansive American forms of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder. If historically poetry has been an aristocratic art and prose a more democratic one, Heaney, following the experiments of the Americans, sought to yoke the two in a series of prose poems called Stations, which he published in pamphlet form in 1975. The title recalls the Stations of the Cross, but rather than focus on Christ's agonizing Passion and Crucifixion, Heaney dwells on personal and political crises. Again he secularizes the cross so that it refers to his own multifarious crossings—between Ireland and America, Ulster and the Republic, Protestantism and Catholicism, and even between prose and poetry. Although his sequence of prose poems can be read as a spiritual autobiography in imitatione Christi, it is more specifically a confessional narrative of a boy growing up in Northern Ireland after World War II and gradually recognizing that for centuries the Christian cross has inspired rancorous division rather than divine unity.

After the controversial move from Belfast to Glanmore in 1972, Heaney seemed prepared to shut his "door into the dark" and open "a door into the light" [see "An Interview with Seamus Heaney," by James Randall, in Ploughshares, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1979, pp. 7-22]. In essays and interviews he spoke of trusting a more lucid, conversational voice and of trusting his new, more enlightened audience in the South (which was predominantly Catholic, unlike the predominantly Protestant society in the North). Christopher Ricks in a penetrating review of Field Work ["The Mouth, the Meal and the Book," London Review of Books, November 8, 1979, pp. 4-5], the book that grew out of this transition, rang the changes on this theme of trust. In poetry, politics, and marriage Heaney elevates trust to the status of faith. Still, his faith in a recently acquired freedom, voice, and audience in the South is nevertheless undermined at nearly every point by doubt and distrust. In the North he sought to transcend political responsibilities imposed on him; in the South he equates transcendence with political escapism. Accepting Dante and Robert Lowell as his models, he places his trust in art's ability to confront conflicts between freedom and responsibility, private craft and public involvement, but continually chastises himself for evading commitments and failing to have more impact on the situation he left behind.

The medieval Gaelic poem, Buile Suibhne, which he translates as Sweeney Astray during this period, provides an ancient mask for his contemporary dilemma. Confronted by the horrors of the battle of Moira in Ulster (A.D. 637) and cursed because of his contempt for the invading Christian empire, Suibhne Geilt metamorphoses into a guiltridden bird and, like his Icarian heir, Stephen Dedalus, attempts to fly over nation, religion, and language and to survive by silence, exile, and cunning. He resembles the stock character of medieval iconography, the pagan wild man, although at the end he is converted by his friend, St. Moling, and comes to resemble that other stock figure of medieval Irish lore, the ascetic saint negotiating a penitential peregrinatio through the wilderness. For Heaney, Sweeney acts as a half-pagan, half-Christian persona that, especially in his "Sweeney Redivivus" poems, allows him to dramatize his own guilty feelings aroused by his flight from Ulster to the woods of Wicklow. But if Suibhne takes a penitential journey to atone for his murderous sins against insurgent Christians, Heaney's sin is that he takes a journey—that he abandons his embattled homeland. Once again he seizes on a character and narrative, implicates his own experience in ancient paradigms, and then critically assails them.

The same ironic sense of sin and guilt predominate in that other long poem based on medieval precedents, "Station Island." In Dantesque tones and stanzas, Heaney records his early pilgrimages to the island in Lough Derg where St. Patrick supposedly initiated a three-day vigil of fasting, praying, and mortification. Imitating Dante's journey through the circles of hell and purgatory, Heaney traipses over circles of rocks on the island, communing with tutelary ghosts as he goes. In typical self-reflexive fashion, his pilgrimage engenders an argument about pilgrimages; he journeys to a holy island in order to purge the guilt and anxiety that such journeys create. As he fares forth, most of the prominent figures he summons from the dead (Simon Sweeney, Patrick Kavanagh, William Carleton, Joyce) accuse him of groveling through old rituals that are masochistic, life-denying, meaningless, or simply distracting. They form a formidable opposition but really speak for Heaney's artistic conscience, which is painfully at odds with those two other internal gorgons, his political conscience and his religious conscience. Divided against himself, he once again launches an ambitious investigation into his ambivalent motives, assaulting his ideals and then shoring their fragments into a brilliant poem.

For a postcolonial poet who feels that the religious, political, and linguistic hierarchies imposed on his country by a foreign empire still watermark his psyche, deconstruction is as much a gut response as a well-thoughtout strategy of exposure and demolition. In The Haw Lantern, Heaney mounts his most sustained attack on the binary oppositions that have stratified and oppressed his society in the past, tracing them, as Jacques Derrida and others have done, back to the Platonic and Judeo-Christian origins of Western civilization. Addressing such loaded terms as presence and absence, speech and writing, he deploys his deconstructive maneuvers along a via negativa that negates age-old prejudices in order to affirm the productive interplay of differences. In a country where one sectarian faction pretends to hold a monopoly on truth and justice and historically has chosen to kill those who oppose the "one true way," deconstruction is not simply an abstract hermeneutic strategy designed for clever critics. It has ethical relevance for the reorganization of all aspects of culture.

In The Haw Lantern, however, Heaney criticizes deconstruction, as others have done, for its reckless flirtation with nihilism and frivolous play. As he reinscribes absences with new presences and makes marginal cultures (like Northern Ireland's) central rather than peripheral, he also argues for reconstruction. The book, he proposes in terms borrowed from Mercea Eliade, charts the deconstruction of sacred by profane space. He uses an architectural metaphor of decentering to represent the cultural metamorphosis that he and his generation in Ireland witnessed: "I watched it happen in Irish homes when I first saw a house built where there was no chimney, and then you'd go into rooms without a grate—so no hearth, which in Latin means no focus. So the hearth going away means the house is unfocused … it represents a reality: the unfocusing of space and the desacralizing of it" ["An Interview with Seamus Heaney," by Randy Brandes, in Salmagundi, Fall, 1988, pp. 4-21]. The generic deconstructionist applauds the unfocused, the decentered, and the indeterminate, concluding that all reading and writing is a ludic exercise of negative capability. Heaney responds by celebrating affirmative capability. He seeks "images of a definite space which is both empty and full of potential" and principled ways of tapping and governing that potential. His collection of essays, The Government of the Tongue, elaborates on these poetic preoccupations, speaking eloquently of the always difficult balance between linguistic constraint and freedom, orderly space and unleashed potential, political dictate and private rebuke.

Heaney's former status as a "noncitizen" in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland derived at least in part from his decision to choose writing as his mode of expression rather than the more customary political organ, speech. Domestic and social authorities repressed his will to speak out; poetry became the oracle for his impassioned sense of justice and injustice. His poetry notebook records a passage from the late French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard: "What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us" [quoted in "Poet of the Boys: Seamus Heaney, Ireland's Foremost Living Poet Commands a Growing Audience," by Francis X. Clines, in The New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1983, pp. 42-3, 98-9, 104]. He told Francis Clines from the New York Times, "If I could make poetry that could touch into that kind of thing, that is what I would like to do." Few other poets today articulate as self-consciously and judiciously the difficult issues of language and silence, and especially how they relate to poetic expression and political repression. In a century when major writers have espoused nazism, fascism, monarchism, and other antidemocratic creeds, Heaney's hesitancy to speak out politically seems noble rather than culpable. That his writing dramatizes bipartisan arguments in which historical differences continue to clash gives it an urgency that much contemporary poetry lacks and makes it even more worthy of attentive study.