The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (review)

Seamus Heaney’s status as one of the leading living poets writing in English is assured, and no developments are likely to change it. Nonetheless, the inclusion of Heaney in the popular Cambridge Companion series is significant, and an event that further canonizes him. After all, The Cambridge Companion to Yeats, one of Heaney’s exemplars, was published only three years before. The volume devoted to Heaney appeared in the poet’s seventieth year, a year that appropriately featured extensive tributes in the Irish Times, on Telefis Éireann, Radio Éireann, and elsewhere around the world.

For the Cambridge series, the Oxford medievalist and poet Bernard O’Donoghue—author of a slim but elegantly argued book, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1994)—has assembled a strong collection of essays and edited them well. O’Donoghue also contributes a striking introduction that offers an overview of Heaney’s career, an essay (“Heaney’s Classics and the Bucolic”), a helpful chronology that runs through 2006, and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary works by and about Heaney. Many of the major Heaney scholars have written essays for this collection, which covers expected and unexpected topics.

Heaney’s bibliographer Rand Brandes provides a valuable opening essay, “Seamus Heaney’s Working Titles: From ‘Advancements of Learning’ to ‘Midnight Anvil’.” Brandes argues that, like Yeats, Heaney has attempted to write one “great” book that comprises all the volumes he has authored; the sense of wholeness is achieved in part by Heaney’s having chosen a series of titles that eschew the self-referential, the overly literary, or the overly colloquial, and refuse to mimic the titles of other poets. This essay, along with the next two, Patrick Crotty’s “The Context of Heaney’s Reception,” and Dennis O’Driscoll’s “Heaney in Public,” rank among the strongest in the volume, along with the concluding essay, John Wilson Foster’s incisive “Crediting Marvels: Heaney after 50.” Crotty is not afraid to offer critical judgments, such as listing what he sees as the three “obligatory” studies of Heaney: those by O’Donoghue, Helen Vendler (1998), and Neil Corcoran (1998). There are other requisite studies he might well have mentioned: Blake Morrison’s 1982 volume, admittedly limited in its scope by its publication date, and Daniel Tobin’s Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999), both of which take seriously Heaney’s affinity for mysticism. O’Driscoll, whose recent collection of interviews with Heaney, Stepping Stones (2008),will remain one of the landmark works on the poet, covers an immense amount of ground in his essay and includes a series of eminently quotable passages from Heaney. Foster shows how Heaney’s remarkable cherishing of and remembering of ordinary objects demonstrates how he both believes in marvels and trusts in the marvelous, especially after he turned fifty in 1989.

A cluster of essays address the influences upon Heaney by earlier poets, especially those from Ireland and Northern Ireland—though Guinn Batten’s essay, “Heaney’s Wordsworth and the Poetics of Displacement,” offers a spirited engagement with one of the three most important poets for Heaney (Eliot and Yeats being the other two) by exploring how the maternal colors two different senses of displacement in the poets’ relationship to place. David Wheatley’s essay, “Professing Poetry: Heaney as Critic,” is a welcome one in its focus on Heaney’s critical prose, an aspect of the poet’s work that deserves more consideration. Unfortunately, it has already been superseded by Michael Cavanagh’s outstanding monograph that also appeared in 2009 and with which it shares part of a title: Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics.

Other essays consider specific poetic influences at greater length. Andrew Murphy’s “Heaney and the Irish Poetic Tradition” surveys the influence of Patrick Kavanagh and his affirmatively parochial stance, that of eighteenth century Gaelic poets, and that of the usual suspects in poetry from Northern Ireland...