SOURCE: "Beginnings," in Seamus Heaney, Bucknell University Press, 1975, pp. 19-35.

[In the following excerpt from the full-length study of Heaney's work, Buttel examines the seminal influences on Heaney's early poetry.]

"A poet begins involved with craft, with aspirations that are chiefly concerned with making," Seamus Heaney has said in a statement about his aims which he wrote two or three years ago to accompany a selection of his poems (Corgi Poets in Focus 2). The poet "needs a way of saying and there is a first language he can learn from the voices of other poets, dead and alive." He could have cited "Turkeys Observed" as an illustration of part of his own apprenticeship; this poem, which appeared in the Belfast Telegraph in 1962 (and later in Death of a Naturalist), was his first published one aside from several published before then over the pseudonym Incertus in Gorgon and Q, Queen's University literary magazines. It is not that one detects specific models; rather, the poem seems an exercise in applying some of the standard practices of modern poetry. The poem is characterized by imagistic exactitude: a dead turkey is "A skin bag plumped with inky putty." And it employs a conceit of the sort favored by the Thirties poets: "I find him ranged with his cold squadrons:/ The fuselage is bare, the proud wings snapped,/ The tail-fan stripped down to a shameful rudder" (with the pathos of these concluding lines sunk by the weight of contrivance). Some of the alliteration may be heavy-handed, as in "Blue-breasted in their indifferent mortuary,/ Beached bare on the cold marble slabs/ In immodest underwear frills of feather"—the apprentice reveling here in the craft of prosody; and the word "cowers" in "a turkey cowers in death" may be excessive, but the poet has carefully maintained the elegiac tone, in the modern way, by the "non-poetic" subject matter, by the objectivity of the title, and by the neutrality of the opening line—"One observes them, one expects them." The controlled movement of the poem also sustains the tone: within the fourline stanzas the rhythms are fluent but firm, and, since evidently no rhyme scheme arose naturally in the genesis of the poem, none was forcibly imposed. Although the turkeys, in the setting of "bleak Christmas dazzle," are surely emblems of mortality, their symbolic import is not overly insisted upon.

Basically this is a well-made poem, an academic exercise in the modern mode, the voice for the most part anonymous, still to be discovered. Only in the graphic force of the line "A skin bag plumped with inky putty" and in the second stanza, particularly in the oxymoron "smelly majesty" with its earthy adjective and in the energy of the phrase describing the inert beef, "A half-cow slung from a hook," does the poem anticipate the poet's distinctive manner:

The red sides of beef retain
Some of the smelly majesty of living:
A half-cow slung from a hook maintains
That blood and flesh are not ignored.

A very promising apprentice poem, then. Heaney, again in the Corgi statement, refers to this stage of a poet's development as "a mimicry and a posturing that leads to confidence, a voice of his own that he begins to hear, prompting behind lines he has learned."

The poet's confidence was emerging rapidly at this time, for "Mid-Term Break," a Death of a Naturalist poem, published in Kilkenny Magazine not long after the appearance of "Turkeys Observed," indicates how ably he could now apply his new-found craft to a poetic statement concerning a painful personal experience. Heaney says that the poem, an elegy for a young brother killed in an auto accident, came to him quite spontaneously, that it almost wrote itself without his thinking about craft. Only in the prosodie overdetermination of the first two lines (the speaker "sat all morning in the college sick bay/ Counting bells knelling classes to a close") is there an intrusion of the craftsman at work. The rest reads as a straight recital of the literal details; a litany of trite comforting words becomes part of the quiet testimony of grief: "Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow," "And I was embarrassed/ By old men standing up to shake my hand/ And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'" "as my mother held my hand/ In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs." The lament is undramatized, controlled, simply reported:

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.

The ritual effect of the snowdrops and candles occurs because it was part of the ritual scene; "poppy bruise" is poetically shocking because descriptively accurate; the laconic explanation, "the bumper knocked him clear," and the cruel mathematics of the one-line coda accentuate the understated bitter sadness. The directness, openness, and apparent matter-of-factness in this poem, on a difficult subject for poetry, have become recurrent characteristics of Heaney's voice.

"An Advancement of Learning," however, published in the Irish Times following the two previous poems and later in Death of a Naturalist, begins to project much more clearly the poet's individual voice. "Here," to quote once again from the Corgi statement, "craft passes into technique which is the ability to send the voice in pursuit of the self," and in this poem we follow this very process. If, as Heaney continues, "Technique is dynamic, active, restless, an ever provisional stance of the imagination towards experience," we see here imagination and technique rising to a greater degree of individuality; the poem is definitely in the poet's own idiom though it does exhibit a residue of "mimicry and posturing." The Times Literary Supplement reviewer of Death of a Naturalist, although finding the volume substantial and impressive, complained that "the most obvious surface fault is the rather glib or incongruous imagery stuck on in what seems to be an attempt to hit the required sophistication," quoting as illustration the first two stanzas of the poem, which concerns an encounter with a rat:

I took the embankment path
(As always, deferring
The bridge). The river nosed past,
Pliable, oil-skinned, wearing

A transfer of gables and sky.
Hunched over the railing,
Well away from the road now, I
Considered the dirty-keeled swans.

For the reviewer "'nosed' and 'pliable' are surely doubtful; 'oil-skinned' is clever, but introduces an extraneous association; 'transfer' is somehow uncomfortably neat and final." I would quibble some with this assessment: "Transfer" is clever, all right, but it does indicate the observer's indulgence in idle romantic musings, seeing a pretty picture on the river surface despite the pollution, and it is not final since the pictorial image is picked up in the following stanza in the word "smudging," when the observer's reverie is intruded upon by the obscene reality of a rat which "slobbered curtly, close,/ Smudging the silence."

But more important than the question of limitations is the fact that in this early poem Heaney seized upon an area of subject matter and knowledge congenial to the discovery of his authentic voice. The vividness of physical detail in "back bunched and glistening,/ Ears plastered down on his knobbed skull" and the energy of word and speech in "But God, another was nimbling/ Up the far bank" and "A rat/ Slimed out of the water"—with adjective and noun here metamorphosing into disturbing active verbs: these are typical qualities in the first volume. One notes too the physical accuracy of the response in "My throat sickened so quickly that/ I turned down the path in cold sweat," with the repetition of sound in "sickened" and "quickly" an aural counterpart of actual constrictions in the throat. The effect comes naturally, denying thoughts of either craft or technique; here imagination is in full accord with the experience, and the experience occurs with a psychological lightness, moving from sickening shock to "thrilled care" and observation to a control of the situation; yet at the end a subtle balance of ambiguous reactions is struck, with both distaste and sympathy for the creature bound together with a recognition of man's pollution of nature—"This terror, cold, wet-furred, small-clawed,/Retreated up a pipe for sewage." The discoveries in this poem prepared for the thoroughly distinctive and successful title poem of the collection, Death of a Naturalist, which I will discuss later.

Heaney's literary and linguistic background was not unusual for a boy brought up on a Country Derry farm. Like other children at that time in the environs of Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toome Bridge, along the Bann River just north of where it emerges from Lough Neagh, about thirty miles northwest of Belfast, he was exposed to the remnants of the oral tradition, the local lore and anecdotes, and the stories brought home from or heard at cattle fairs. He tells me that one of his father's cousins, who might be described as one of the surviving hedgerow "school-masters," would visit once a week and read and recite to the children in the family. Occasionally as a young boy and as the eldest child in the family he was called upon at a children's party or when friends and relatives visited to recite verses or sing a song, sentimental or patriotic things, Michael Dwyer's "Sullivan Beare," say, or "Me Da" by the Ulster folk poet W. F. Marshall, or a Percy French ballad such as "The Four Farrellys." Like his fellow students he received training in Gaelic, an extension of his linguistic identity and at least an acquaintance with another and yet a native linguistic tradition. As a boy, though, he wrote next to no poetry, unless one were to count the adolescent, roguish Latin verses that he, along with some his schoolmates at St. Columb's, wrote now and then for amusement and passed surreptitiously to one another. Perhaps, however, it is a sign of his future interest in writing poetry that while at St. Columb's he did try his hand at composing some Miltonic verses, though he got no further than three lines. While there he had one particular advantage, a very good English teacher who had his students reading deeply and thoroughly in Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Keats, and he recalls reading Eliot's "The Hollow Men" at that time.

At Queen's University Heaney's interests became more definitely literary. There in the English syllabus he encountered a wider range of literature, other poets in the English tradition such as Clare and Hardy (as John Press in an article in The Southern Review has pointed out) and Hopkins, but also twentieth-century poets. At the same time he was becoming conscious of the Irish tradition, Yeats of course and other poets, both Anglo-Irish and unhyphenated Irish. He remembers reading Patrick Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger" during this period, and its powerful effect on him, for it was a modern poem that suggested possibilities for treating Irish subject matter. Then, while at St. Joseph's College of Education in 1961-62, he discovered and read Six Irish Poets, edited by Robin Skelton and including Austin Clarke, Richard Kell, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Richard Murphy, and Richard Weber. Also he wrote for a course he was taking a long paper on literary magazines in Ulster and learned through this project that a body of poetry could exist outside the classical English canon. Here were Irish poets, what's more Northern Irish poets, who had created a poetry out of their local and native background—W. R. Rodgers and John Hewitt especially. In the latter Heaney found not only a regionalist but one who was also quite urbane. Meanwhile he was continuing to discover other, non-Irish, poets too, R. S. Thomas and Ted Hughes, for example. It was also during this time, while these various influences were contributing to his own interests and urging s and adding to his growing assurance, and while his poems were beginning to be published, that he became one of a group of young writers who met regularly to discuss their work at the home of the English poet Philip Hobsbaum, who had come to teach at Queen's the year Heaney was at St. Joseph's. This was a group, says Heaney, that "generated a literary life" in Belfast; it was in this group that the poet met his friend and fellow poet, Michael Longley. Now he was no longer working in isolation. Here was a "forum" where he received serious criticism which countered the pleasing corroboration he felt when editors began accepting his poems.

The relatively few poems he wrote as an undergraduate dramatize the leap he was to make so shortly afterward. "Reaping in Heat," for example, depends on such poeticisms as "sycamores heaved a sleepless sigh" and "Lark's trills/ Shimmered" and it concludes on a Keatsian-Georgian note:

"October Thought" shows the impress of Hopkins on the neophyte poet:

Minute movement millionfold whispers twilight
Under heaven-hue plum-blue and gorse pricked with gold,
And through the knuckle-gnarl of branches, poking the night
Comes the trickling tinkle of bells, well in the fold.

Heaney says that he was captivated by Dylan Thomas's poetry at this time too and published in Gorgon or O a poem very much in the Welsh poet's manner (though I have been unable to locate this poem and one or two others). "October Thought" is typical of what any number of university students might produce, though few of them would develop beyond this point. We can see in hindsight, however, that Heaney's obvious imitation of Hopkins (and I suspect that the same could be said of the Thomas poem) was, in its intricate wordplay, assonance, and alliteration, an initial learning of his craft, a prelude to his transposing of the primitive skills in this poem into his own mature technique and voice. Furthermore, in another poem, "Lines to Myself," we observe the poet goading himself into a more trenchant, forceful style:

In poetry I wish you would
Avoid the lilting platitude.
Give us poems, humped and strong,
Laced tight with thongs of song.
Poems that explode in silence
Without forcing, without violence.
Whose music is strong and clear and good
Like a saw zooming in seasoned wood.
You should attempt concrete compression,
Half guessing, half expression.

And here both the advice and the style itself anticipate the course Heaney was to follow.

His rapid maturing as a poet who some four years later would publish an impressive first book is not entirely surprising. During this relatively brief period that I have been discussing, a number of literary stimuli seem to have converged for Heaney into a provisional poetics, a poetics for which he required some form of confirmation, of validation. A poetry of fuselages or of sociology was not authentic for him; what was, a poetry concerned with nature, the shocks and discoveries of childhood experience on a farm, the mythos of the locale—in short, a regional poetry—was essentially a counterpoetry, decidedly not fashionable at the time. To write such poetry called for a measure of confidence if not outright defiance. Indeed, Anthony Thwaite in his New Statesman review of Door into the Dark sees the authenticity of the poems but finds their appeal exotic, adding wryly, "Turbines and pylons for the 1930s: bulls for the 1960s. It's an odd progression." And a number of reviewers misleadingly have linked the poet with the Georgians, who relatively speaking played over the bucolic surface of nature whereas Heaney digs into the archetypal roots and into the psychic roots of his own being as well. As John Press says in his article, regionalism "may lend itself to a kind of universality which escapes the poetry of men whose material is derived from a study of contemporary politics." Put another way, it is what the poet does with his donné that matters. If the result is effective it makes little difference whether the poet begins with bulls or, as in the case of Alan Ginsberg, with supermarkets or other heterogeneous details of American culture.

Two poets in particular, it seems clear, served to release the young poet's latent purposes, to offerthe validation he required. Frost was one, certainly a pivotal figure for Heaney. Benedict Kiely; in his Hollins Critic article, "A raid into Dark Corners: the Poetry of Seamus Heaney," reports the poet's saying "that the first poet who ever spoke to him was Robert Frost." "Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for picking," a line in "Blackberry-Picking" (Death of a Naturalist) which bears an imprint of Frost's "After Apple Picking," is only one of a number of resemblances showing how well the Irish poet heard the American: both poets excel at rendering physical detail and sense experience. And Heaney must have noticed in Frost a poet who went against the grain of obvious experimentalism in his era and wrote verse in traditional forms—traditional forms but charged with the rhythms of natural speech. He must have noticed other characteristics too: a vision of nature which includes dark forces as we as benign ones; the human pain and tragedy suffered as profoundly by rural inhabitants as by others; the combining of matter of fact with transcendental inclinations; the appreciation of native skills and disciplines which have their corre spondences to the art of poetry. (The poet informs me, incidentally, that although he was generally unenthusiastic about farm work and not especially adept—like Frost—the one exception was his skill with a pitchfork, for which he earned some local acclaim.) Heaney, however, did not become a servile imitator even though specific signs of Frost's influence persist, with decreasing frequency, into Wintering Out, his most recent volume. He had found a twentieth-century model for the kind of poetry he desired to write, a model more recent than, say, Wordsworth or Clare, and he set about creating work that in theme and style diverges markedly from Frost's.

The other poet is Ted Hughes, whose poetry he came upon around 1962, and who provided a contemporary source of encouragement, a reinforcement of that given by Frost. One can perceive what this English poet meant, and still means, to Heaney when we read him saying in his review of Hughes's Selected Poems ("Deep as England" in Hibernia, December 1, 1972) that "Hughes brought back into English poetry an unsentimental intimacy with the hidden country. Probably not since John Clare had the outback of hedge and farmyard been viewed so urgently." But that intimacy goes deeper with both poets than hedge and farmyard; Heaney says that in Hughes's poetry "racial memory, animal instinct and poetic inspiration all flow into one another," and he might as well be speaking of his own poetry, a point that should become apparent in the course of this study. With an exception or two—"the last wolf killed in Britain" in Hughes's "February" and "the wolf has died out/ In Ireland" in Heaney's "Midnight" (Wintering Out)—it is not a matter of direct parallels or borrowings: superficial comparisons are easy enough to find in the rank, brute particulars of nature exploited by both poets. More important are the general affinities as, for example, the attraction of the archetypal and pagan for both. And Heaney's statement about Hughes, "It is not enough to praise his imagery for 'its admirable violence' or its exact sensuousness," could again refer to himself. He says that the chief effect on him was in the matter of diction, and the similarity here is pronounced: in both poets words erupt with kinesthetic and visceral force; a line will turn on a deliberately "unpoetic" word. Heaney speaks for both when he says, "Into the elegant, iambic and typically standard English intonations of contemporary verse he interjected an energetic, heavily stressed, consciously extravagant and inventive northern voice." Even here, however, it is not a case of direct borrowing; Heaney, as the sudden outpouring of his poems suggested, had his own inner board of language. Hughes was a fortuitous example. As John Press says, it was not so much discipleship: Hughes "saved [him] from making a false start." The important thing is that as he was getting started Heaney felt affinities with a number of poets, from Wordsworth to Hughes, who helped reveal to him his own resources.

Superseding literary influences and affinities in importance are the poet's identification with place and his intense engagement with language. These, I believe, would have enabled him to survive any false start. "Our poesy is as a gum which oozes/ From whence tis nourished": he is fond of this utterance by the poet in Timon of Athens and has quoted it more than once, one occasion being in an article he wrote for The Guardian in May, 1972, "The Trade of an Irish Poet," a key statement on the origins of his poetry. Press quotes him as saying that "Wordsworth was lucky and … I was lucky in having this kind of rich, archetypal subject matter … as part of growing up." Whereas Frost vitiated some of his poetry by becoming too often the poseur of his region, Heaney writes out of what is inextricably his birthright. Rural life itself has a rhythm determined by the cycle of the seasons and the round of tasks; it becomes a ritual of the land. Birth and death, immediate events, are parts of that rhythm too. In this setting a child's life has its full quota of drama, real terrors merging into the realm of legend: "the bog was rushy and treacherous," Heaney reports in the Guardian article, "no place for children. They said you shouldn't go near the moss-holes because 'there was no bottom in them.'"

And in this setting the landmarks of Irish history and myth project themselves into present consciousness. Benedict Kiely tells us that "Rody McCorley, the patriot boy renowned in balladry, was hanged at the Bridge of Toome in 1798" and he continues,

To the west of the loughshore are the Sperrin mountains to which O'Neill withdrew between Kinsale and his final flight to Europe. Glanconkyne, where he stayed for a while, has a complicated mythology associated with the autumn festival of Lugh, the father, in the mythologies, of Cuchullain. The mountains are plentifully marked by pre-Celtic standing stones and stone circles.

Thus it is an area where history, with its battles, heroes, subjections, and famines, flows back into prehistory, legend, and myth. In this rich primal material not only does the past inform the present but fable and land are conjoined, and it is against this background that one takes on a clear but complicated identity.

Looking back now, Heaney can see that he grew up in a center that did hold. Despite the history of discord and the recent eruption of conflict and violence that has so horribly blighted life in Northern Ireland, he did as a boy experience comparative stability. Catholics, the majority in his area, lived in relative harmony with the Protestants, a sharp awareness of differences notwithstanding. (George Evans, a Protestant neighbor, on one occasion brought rosary beads back from Rome and presented them to the Heaneys: "I stole them from the Pope's dresser," he said.) The differences were inescapable, however. Heaney says, again in the Guardian article, that in Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toome, he was "symbolically placed between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between 'the demesne' [Moyola Park, now occupied by Lord Moyola, formerly Major James Chicester-Clark, ex-Unionist Prime Minister] and the 'bog' … The demesne was walled, wooded, beyond our ken."

This symbolic split has meant that the poet writes out of a dual perspective, and it has had special import for the language of his poetry. "The seeds," he has told me, "were in language, words." Even when a youth, before he was struck by any overt urge to write poems, individual words were compelling, to be mulled over in the mind. With more self-awareness now he can analyze the twinsources of his language, the literary words and the words of place, of origins or, put another way, the English and the native. Is Mossbawn, he wonders in the Guardian essay, a Scots-English word meaning the planter's house on the bog, or since "we pronounced it Moss Bann, and ban is the Gaelic word for white," might it not mean "the white moss, the moss of bog cotton? In the syllables of my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster." The names of the nearby townlands of Broagh and Anahorish "are forgotten Gaelic music in the throat, bruach and anach fhior uisce, the riverbank and the place of clear water," and they made their way into two of the poems in Wintering Out for which they serve as subject and title. Two other names in the immediate area, Grove Hill and Back Park, "insist that this familiar locale is a version of pastoral"; "Grove is a word that I associate with translations of the classics." His auditory imagination prefers another name, "The Dirraghs, from doire as in Derry," but nonetheless Spenser and Sir John Davies, who played their parts in the crushing of the indigenous culture, are also as poets figures who command his attention, contributing to the complex education one receives in this "split culture." The article concludes with this paragraph:

Certainly the secret of being a poet, Irish or otherwise, lies in the summoning and meshing of the subconscious and semantic energies of words. But my quest for precision and definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of a landscape that I was born with. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awareness nourished on English as consonants. My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience.

Although he wants his idiom to adhere closely to the speech he was born with this does not mean that the effort should be methodical and deliberate, an effort to apply rigidly the view, "formulated most coherently by Thomas McDonagh," the scholar-activist slain in the 1916 uprising, that "the distinctive note of Irish poetry is struck when the rhythms and assonances of Gaelic poetry insinuate themselves into the texture of English verse." Sympathetic to the attempts of Austin Clarke and others to apply Gaelic techniques systematically, he finds "the whole enterprise a bit programmatic." It is better, he implies, to trust to one's roots and let the language of the poems arise naturally. This is what he has done, to singular advantage.

He is conscious of other divisions as well. Press quotes him as having experienced an "exile from a way of life which I was brought up to … from a farming community to an academic … exile in time … from childhood." This exile has resulted in an acute search into his cultural roots, accentuated by his moving in the conflicting worlds of Mossbawn-Belfast, Ulster-Ireland-England, Ireland-America. The search has been inward too, into the sources of self, which are also, ultimately, the sources of poetry. Further, he is a Catholic poet and fully aware of inner tensions the Catholic is heir to; constantly redeemed and constantly instilled with guilt. Benedict Kiely reports his saying, "Penance indeed was a sacrament that rinsed and renewed … but although it did give a momentary release from guilt, it kept this sense of sin as inseparable from one's life as one's shadows." But if some of his poems can be said to depend on a Catholic imagination, he has not been content to rest there; he has probed into the unconscious. As he asserts in The Listener (February 5, 1970), "circumstances have changed and writing is usually born today out of the dark active centre of the imagination … I think this notion of the dark centre, the blurred and irrational storehouse of insight and instincts, the hidden core of the self—this notion is the foundation of what viewpoint I might articulate for myself as a poet."