In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe by Magdalena Kay (review)

Magdalena Kay’s impressively argued study of Seamus Heaney’s poetry reveals how several Eastern European poets, particularly Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert, enabled Heaney to proceed more confidently into proclaiming truths from the spiritual world, particularly beginning in his poetry from the 1980s – Station Island (1984) and The Haw Lantern (1987). Heaney critics tend to privilege Seeing Things (1991) as the transitional volume where he stops musing on the “murderous” and turns to the “marvelous,” as he noted in his Nobel Prize address, “Crediting Poetry.” Kay correctly locates this change in the 1980s poetry but neglects Dante’s crucial influence on Heaney’s spiritual turn when she flatly claims that it “exists in response to poetic developments on the other side of Europe [the East].”

Strangely, she omits analysis of Heaney’s pamphlet, An Open Letter (1983), published during this same period, which invokes a narrative by one of the poets to whom she pays almost no attention in this often lucid and sensitively argued analysis – the Czech Miroslav Holub. Heaney also wrote an entire essay about Holub, “The Fully Exposed Poem,” which he collected in The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978–1987 (1988). More puzzling is Kay’s tendency to discount Osip Mandelstam’s influence on Heaney, which she limits mainly to his recovery of Dante and Mendelstam’s tragic but inspiring life for the Irish poet. Heaney was reading Mandelstam’s poetry years before he knew his biography (and before he read Miłosz), though, and he told Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008) that the poetry spoke to him. He further noted that Robert Tracy’s translation of Mandelstam’s Stone gave him a sense of the architectural principle’s importance for the Russian’s conception of poetic form. When Heaney writes in “Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and Knocker” that “Mandelstam implied that it was the poet’s responsibility to allow poems to form in language inside him, the way crystals formed in a chemical solution,” he accords Mandelstam the highest praise he can give another poet, approval he echoes in his Dante essay. Kay argues, however, that Heaney “does not take poetic influence from Mandelstam. … He does not try to write like Mandelstam.” But, clearly, Heaney at least learned a great deal about form from Mandelstam. Moreover, Kay makes an artificial division between Heaney’s poetry and his literary criticism – when his own poetry and prose often complement each other – in refusing to admit Mandelstam’s influence on the former but accepting it for the latter.

Heaney himself told O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones that he finally not only could not separate Mandelstam’s life from his work but also could not divorce Miłosz’s life from his work. Heaney praises Miłosz for the “abundance and spontaneity of the work, his at-homeness in so many different genres and landscapes, his desire for belief and his equally acute skepticism,” and “[c]hiefly … [for] a quality of wisdom,” in a column he wrote for the centenary of the Polish poet’s birth in 2011, which was published in The Guardian. He clearly sees Miłosz’s poetry and life as intertwined, just as Mandelstam’s early poetry and martyr status were for him.

Overall, however, Kay’s In Gratitude for All the Gifts offers a strong case through close readings of the original Polish poetry and essays of Herbert and Miłosz that Heaney’s deep immersion in these Eastern European poets taught him “that poetry’s soteriological function comes about through its discovery of grace even where we were convinced the force of gravity held us in thrall.” Miłosz helped Heaney not only to appreciate atrocity – which he had already witnessed in Northern Ireland – but also to believe in “the musicality of poetry’s form” and thus to “bear the weight of experience it supports and encloses.” This study...