Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (review)

Well before his best-selling and prize-winning translation of Beowulf came out in 1999, Seamus Heaney's poetry had sustained a long engagement with medieval literature. In fact the Introduction to his Beowulf translation notes that one of his earlier poems, "Digging" (1966), contained pairs of lines that closely resembled the alliterating half-lines of Old English "without any conscious intent on my part." But the engagement goes well beyond Beowulf and beyond conscious or unconscious imitation. Conor McCarthy surveys all of Heaney's poetry to investigate translations, allusions, and other kinds of invocations of medieval literature with special attention to Buile Suibhne ("Sweeney Astray"), Dante Alighieri, Beowulf, and Robert Henryson. The extended list of Heaney's further references to medieval literature on pp. 4–5, though not a focus of the book, is remarkable for its sweep. In each chapter McCarthy displays an impressive knowledge of Heaney's extended body of work, including his critical prose, and a more limited knowledge of recent criticism and of contemporary poets (although his command of the Anglo-Irish scene is solid). The plot summaries for some better-known medieval mainstays, such as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, suggest that the book was written for the ever-elusive general reader or critics of contemporary poetry rather than medievalists, but even specialists will find much to ponder here. The book's main strength is in its capacious reach rather than interpretive insights. Heaney's reach, of course, is even broader, with translations and allusions to Russian, ancient Greek, classical Latin, and other non-medieval literatures, which raises the question "why medieval?" in two separate ways: why write a book that singles out only Heaney's medieval allusions in preference to the others, and what is it in medieval literature that seems to speak to him so powerfully? Despite some interesting observations in the Introduction and Conclusion about Heaney's ongoing engagement with the complexity of these texts and their relevance to contemporary politics, McCarthy's book raises these questions without offering a full answer.

Formulating such an answer would challenge even the most astute critic because the four texts chosen for scrutiny are so different from each other (in genre, period, etc.) and come from four medieval vernaculars: early Irish, Old English, Italian, and Middle Scots. The text that is probably least known to the readers of this journal is Buile Suibhne, which Heaney translates as "Sweeney Astray," an episodic work of prose and verse in which a pagan king (Sweeney) is cursed with madness after two acts of violence against the local bishop. It survives in seventeenth-century manuscripts, which are copies of earlier medieval versions, and parts of it may go back before the year 1000. McCarthy provides much useful explanatory material, but here and throughout the book some of this becomes centrifugal to the main texts as, for example, with the discussion of that time-honored Irish Roman-Catholic obsession: guilt. Where does it lead? After much discussion we learn that "there can be no literal equivalence between Heaney's sense of guilt and Sweeney's" (p. 23). Yet the legend usefully introduces the figure of the poet as outcast: "the figure of Sweeney, the homesick exile, expresses something far deeper than circumstance for a Northern poet gone south" (p. 35). It also anticipates Heaney's sympathetic treatment of other figures of exclusion (the Grendelkin, Cresseid) and exile (Dante).

The Dante chapter is the most diffuse, not least because Heaney's engagement with Dante remains more oblique than with the other medieval texts surveyed. Aside from "Ugolino" (1979), a fairly direct translation of the famous episode from Inferno 32 and 33, other invocations or allusions to Dante are brief or concern the motif of a journey to the underworld. One allusion that escapes McCarthy's dragnet is found in "On His Work in the English Tongue" from Electric Light (2001), which in addition to the extended quotation from Beowulf (noted...