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  • Seamus Heaney and the Importance of Larkin
  • Raphaël Ingelbien (bio)

Seamus Heaney has never tried to conceal the interplay between his criticism and his poetry. Indeed, the title of his first collection of essays, Preoccupations,1 calls attention to the links between his creative and critical processes, while also hinting at the political causes for concern which loom behind both. Heaney’s career has been marked by various shifts in the complex equations among his readings, his poetic re-writings, and his relation to Irish politics. In particular, a study of his response to the poetry of Philip Larkin is one of the most instructive means of tracing Heaney’s development. Conversely, such a task can also shed light on Larkin himself. Although Heaney’s writings on Larkin are often rooted in his own concerns, some of his pronouncements have gained wide critical currency. Analyzing the various aspects of Heaney’s continued engagement with Larkin can thus help us revise some commonly held assumptions about the latter’s work. A better understanding of Heaney’s response to Larkin will also make possible a reconsideration of the place of nationhood in the works of these two central figures of post-war English and Irish poetry.

Heaney first discussed Philip Larkin in his 1976 essay “Englands of the Mind,” written in the wake of such collections as Wintering Out, North and Stations, in which Heaney himself was concerned with defining his own Ireland of the mind. The essay examines new poetic ways of defining English identity in the post-war period and deals with writers whom Heaney sees as “hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England” (Preoccupations, p. 150). Its first sections are devoted to Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, and Heaney’s critical acumen soon confirms that in the works of those poets, he had discovered a spirit kindred to his own. He thus makes many suggestive remarks about the place of English history in the work of Ted Hughes—a poet whose influence on Heaney, although repeatedly acknowledged, [End Page 471] deserves more thorough critical investigations than it has prompted so far.2 “Englands of the Mind” further offers an absorbing reading of the philological subtleties that characterize some poems by Geoffrey Hill. Hill’s example had been both compelling and inhibiting for his Irish contemporary. In the foreword to Stations, Heaney explains that the prose poems which make up that collection

were begun in California in 1970/71 although the greater part of them came rapidly to a head in May and June last year [1974]. The delay was partly occasioned by the appearance of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns: what I had regarded as stolen marches in a form new to me had been headed off by a work of complete authority.

Heaney’s exploration of his own “catechism with its woodcut mysteries and polysyllabic runs, its ‘clandestine solemnizations,’ ‘its morose delectation and concupiscence,’”3 does indeed bring Hill’s own sophisticated idiom to mind. It is not surprising that the very words of Stations recur in “Englands of the Mind,” in which Heaney imagines “Hill as indulging in a morose linguistic delectation” (Preoccupations, p. 160. Emphases added).4

The third writer whom Heaney discusses in “Englands of the Minds” makes rather an unlikely companion to Hughes and Hill. Philip Larkin was not only a very different poet from his slightly younger contemporaries, but his work was also much less of a source of inspiration for Heaney at the time. It is sometimes claimed that Heaney’s early poetry responds to Larkin as well as Hughes,5 but his first collections only exceptionally suggest the former’s influence. One isolated example may be “Scaffolding” (Death of a Naturalist, p. 37), in which the process of erecting a building is compared to the first steps in a love relationship. This somehow recalls the extended metaphors of some poems in The Less Deceived (“No Road,” “Skin,” for example), but may equally point back to other models (for example, the Metaphysicals). Moreover, such poems grew even more scarce in Heaney’s output in the 1970s, when “Englands of the Mind” was written.

Comparisons between Larkin...

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