Seamus Heaney

Vendler, Helen

'In the following pages, I trace Seamus Heaney's development as a poet from 1966 to 1996'; moving from ‘the matter of Ireland’ to ‘what was the matter with Ireland’ – the poet’s first collection ‘Death of a Naturalist’ drew on his rural background for its earthy imagery such as ‘The Seed Cutters’ on the family farm. But as Northern Island descended into violence after 1968, into ‘a quarter century of life waste and spirit waste’, the Catholic poet was forced to become a poet of public as well as private life, a role whose pressures are reflected in the darkness of works such as ‘North’ and ‘Station Island’, in images like a bloody dream ‘of bodies raining down like tattered meat’. In the struggle to be both socially responsible and creatively free, his art, he said, ‘makes space for the marvellous as well as for the murderous'; inscribed, 'Especially for Barry [Humphries] by John Olsen '09'.