Seamus Heaney’s marvelous letters, once they are linked as they should be with Stepping Stones, the richly informative interviews Dennis O’Driscoll conducted with the poet over many years, should suffice as a working biography of the poet until the official life by Fintan O’Toole appears. Generous and full, the letters reveal what the poems themselves embody—the reverence Heaney forever held for fathers and the spiritual guides who came before him.

Heaney’s poetry derives its power from a unique fusion of pastoral homage and lexical precision. In that poetry, which seeks conciliation, dramatic personal confrontations are rare and are memorable for that reason. In Station Island, Heaney startles the reader with one such confrontation—between the poet himself and the spectral presence of James Joyce. The encounter reveals a fundamental tension in Heaney’s career, a struggle between public duty and artistic liberty: 

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers

came back to me, though he did not speak yet,

a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

 

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite

as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,

and suddenly he hit a litter basket

 

with his stick, saying, “Your obligation

is not discharged by any common rite.

What you must do must be done on your own

 

so get back in harness. The main thing is to write

for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

that imagines its heaven like your hands at night

 

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

 

let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.

Let go, let fly, forget.

You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.

Joyce’s paternal advice to the poet is to ignore obligation:

You lose more of yourself than you redeem

doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.

When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

out on your own and fill the element

with signatures on your own frequency,

echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.

The letters bear witness to the difficulty Heaney faced when he sought to follow Joyce’s advice. The older writer, who proclaimed himself an “eternal priest of the imagination,” exalted self-sufficiency; Heaney found such autonomy appealing but hard to come by. On one occasion, having spent hours on the onerous duty of judging thousands of poems for a huge prize, Heaney wrote to fellow-poet Michael Longley, “As usual I am feeling that most of my life is busy and useless, that the time is being frittered yet somehow the frittering is inevitable.” And to John McGahern in 1975, he wrote: “I wanted to be rid of the enervating social footwork entailed in the role of papist-writer-makes-good-and-in-danger-of-co-option-by-Union-establishment.” Again and again, he yearned like Joyce to go beyond the obligatory and the “decent,” but that is where he often found himself.

For some four decades, Heaney could measure time by the steady rise of his popular success and acclaim. But when judging himself by a more exacting measure, he saw his days dissipated by obligation. In letters to his closest friends (Seamus Deane, Ted Hughes, Longley, and the American novelist Thomas Flanagan), he called this “duty-dancing.” Readings, lectures, signings, interviews, honorific dinners, and yet more readings, with each appearance only prompting more invitations and more prizes. In a 1996 letter to Dartmouth professor Tom Sleigh, he wrote “I seem to spend my time in the executive part of my being or in the domestic, escaping too rarely into the opener, scarier emptinesses of the writing part.” Even his home on Strand Road in Dublin had become more public, more “executive,” with fifteen or so letters arriving each day requesting advice, approval, or acknowledgement. The unlisted phone forever rang. When he did find escape, it was within the cottage in Ashford, Co. Wicklow. There, amid simplicity and silence, he could write (“I’m upstairs here in a room with a trunk-lid fit and shape to the ceiling. Dry as snuff. Looking out at ivy on the hawthorn, and ferns and still ash trees. Yellow rag-wort. Stone walls Barley”). Another kind of liberty, despite its oddity, was never far to seek—that of an airplane at 35,000 feet—but such travel took the poet to places (South Africa, Japan, Eastern Europe, Australia, Montana) where yet another reading, another honorary degree, another interview awaited him.

After being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, Heaney’s exposure to an already very large public became even wider, deeper, and more extortionate. “There’s no such thing as a free Nobel Prize,” said his wife Marie. His fame required him, now a preeminent public entity, to take a position about Irish politics—the “Troubles”— surrounding him. He sought to do otherwise. After having lived for years in a land devastated by militant conflict, he maintained that the spectrum of ideological entities (“IRA/UDR/BRIT”) on the island were “all anti-artistic constituencies.” He would try to “keep at a tangent,” bound only by the regimen of poetry and the lessons of other poets. He would defer not to political obligation, but to something much older: the homage to be paid by younger poet to older poet, by son to strong and resolute father.

In his early and best-known poem, “Digging,” those rules—in which the younger is enjoined to follow the older—are observed just as they are being violated:

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.[…]

 

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them

 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests. 

I’ll dig with it.

Spade or pen, farmer or poet, the principles of craft, not of faction, were to govern everything. The letters reveal how much Heaney revered those writers older than himself (Robert Lowell, Robert Frost) or artists to whom he could offer obeisance. (Of the playwright Brian Friel he wrote, “I felt that a brow on the floor, or at least a grave and formal inclination from the waist, to acknowledge seniority, majesty, friendship, love even, was called for.”) He also admired writers who knew more about Ireland than he did (Flanagan again): “I suppose you’re destined to be a father-figure of sorts to me…Why don’t you come here and be Yeats to all [my] urgent and undirected energy?” About Ted Hughes, his most important correspondent, and a writer only slightly older than himself, Heaney wrote: “He fostered me as a poet.” 

Fatherly presences, fatherly guidance, and the admonitory voice of the departed but ever-present older man appear and reappear in these letters. Upon revisiting the homestead where he had grown up, Heaney wrote: “When I go up to-morrow…. My dead daddy is beaming himself up in gratifying ways again.” And in a very early poem, written at the same time as “Digging,” Heaney turns upside down the relationship of son to father, but the terms remain the same:

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the published sod;

Sometimes he rode me on his back

Dipping and rising to his plod.

 

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow round the farm.

 

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away.

What made Seamus Heaney attractive and beloved by readers all over the world and what will keep his poems alive and fresh for future readers is the devotion he had to the natural world and the respect he had for the filial bonds that shelter us when ideology cannot speak.

The letters, candid and generously sympathetic, as well as many of his poems, tell us of the continuing drama of the filial acknowledgment that drove Heaney—even a Heaney occasionally feeling “busy and useless” or “lethargic”—to produce some twenty volumes of poetry, five works of prose, and two plays. One of those last works, almost completed at the time of his death, was his translation of Book Five of the Aeneid. In it, father and son, Aeneas and Anchises, meet:

Often and often, father, you would appear to me,

Your sad shape would appear, and that kept me going

To this end. My ships are anchored in the Tuscan sea.

Let me take your hand, my father, O let me, and do not

Hold back from my embrace.

Heaney had foreseen the power of this moment in Virgil’s poem in a poem of his own, “Seeing Things.” Composed in mid-career, it is, again, father and son, once more the departed father and once more the reverential son:

I saw him face to face, he came to me

With his damp footprints out of the river,

And there was nothing between us there

That might not still be happily ever after.

As these letters tell us, Heaney could not follow Joyce’s advice. Instead, he filled the element with signatures of his own frequency.

The Letters of Seamus Heaney
Edited and selected by Christopher Reid 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$45 | 848 pp.