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Seamus Heaney and the Aesthetics of Enlightenment Shea Robert Seamus Heaney and the Aesthetics of Enlightenment Shea Robert Atchison BA (Hons), M.A. Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Ulster University A thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2020 I confirm that the word count of this thesis is less than 100,000 excluding the title page, contents, acknowledgements, abstract, abbreviations, footnotes, and bibliography. in memoriam May Gallagher, 1938-2019 Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... i Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................. iii 1. Heaney and Enlightenment: Introduction ..................................................................... 1 2. A Spiritual Intellect: Heaney’s Conceptualisation of Enlightenment ....................... 27 2.1. Proper Work in an Agnostic Time, 1963-1975 .................................................... 27 2.2. The Idea of Transcendence, 1977-1986 ............................................................... 33 2.3. Inclusive Consciousness, 1988-1991 ................................................................... 49 2.4. A Solemn Order of Reality, 1992-2008 ............................................................... 59 3. Glimmerings: Enlightenment in the Early Poems ...................................................... 72 4. ‘Somewhere, well out, beyond…’: Field Work and the Romantic Transcendent .... 90 4.1. Escaping History: ‘Oysters’ and ‘Casualty’ ........................................................ 94 4.2. ‘Mysteries’: The Glanmore Sonnets .................................................................... 98 4.3. ‘You were beyond me’: Spiritualizing Marriage ............................................... 105 5. ‘Making Strange’: Defamiliarization in Station Island ............................................ 112 5.1. Strangeness and Reality ..................................................................................... 113 5.2. Repining for the Eternal in ‘Station Island’ ....................................................... 121 5.3. Sweaney’s Flight ................................................................................................ 128 6. Emptied Space: The Via Negativa of The Haw Lantern............................................ 138 6.1. ‘Not just single things’: Neoplatonism and Apophatic Theology ..................... 138 6.2. Emptiness in ‘Clearances’.................................................................................. 144 6.3. Seeking ‘Proof and Wonder’ ............................................................................. 147 7. ‘Everything Flows’: Enlightened Perception in Seeing Things ............................... 156 7.1. Crediting Marvels .............................................................................................. 158 7.2. Space, Time, Flux: ‘Markings’ .......................................................................... 161 7.3. Three-Dimensional Space .................................................................................. 164 7.4. The Eternal Now ................................................................................................ 168 7.5. Heraclitean Flux ................................................................................................. 172 8. ‘After Liberation’: Enlightenment in the Late Poems ............................................. 181 8.1. ‘All Foreknowledge’: Circularity, Foreknowledge, Determinism ..................... 184 8.2. Non-Attachment ................................................................................................. 201 8.3. A Not Unwelcoming Emptiness: Death and Completion .................................. 218 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 237 Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to Tim Hancock, Frank Sewell, Frank Ferguson, and Bruce Stewart. To Gerardine and Eugene Kielt. To my parents, Collette and Seamus Atchison. To Rebecca, who looks after me, and to the dedicatee, who used to. S. R. A. Sion Mills January 2020 Abstract This thesis seeks to offer a picture of enlightenment in Seamus Heaney’s twelve major volumes of poetry, arguing that they reveal an unfolding record of self-directed, and increasingly self-aware, spiritual enquiry, one that is informed by a wide range of Eastern and Western traditions of metaphysics, mysticism and theology. Convinced that poetry constitutes a unique category of spiritual activity, Heaney was—above all else—a seeker after enlightenment who appropriately earned a reputation as ‘a mystic of the ordinary’.1 In this context, I suggest that his poetic oeuvre can be read in the form of a triptych. The first phase reflects his own suggestion that Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North comprise ‘one book’, a book that is framed by two major self-portraits: ‘Personal Helicon’, which projects into darkness, and ‘Exposure’, which anticipates raised sights and the possibility of transcendence in the image of the missed comet. The second phase tests various approaches towards this elusive end: the Romantic intimations of Field Work; the defamiliarized vision of Ireland in Station Island; the apophatic via negativa of The Haw Lantern; finally, the visionary claritas of Seeing Things, with its vivid depictions of three-dimensional space, the eternal Now, and Heraclitean flux. The third and last phase— comprising The Spirit Level, Electric Light, District and Circle, and Human Chain—sees the penetrative ambitions of the spiritual seeker replaced by the circuitousness of meditative reflection. Attendant structural motifs of circularity, self-referentiality and foreknowledge are repeatedly inscribed in the fabric of the poet’s later work, as spiritual maturity leads to a greater emphasis on contemplation and acceptance. 1 John Montague, ‘A friend who realised his destiny in full’, The Irish Times, 7 September 2013 <https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-friend-who-realised-his-destiny-in-full-1.1517533> [accessed February 2016]. List of Abbreviations Titles of books frequently referred to, especially Heaney’s individual volumes of poetry and four collected volumes of prose essays. Unless otherwise stated, Heaney’s major volumes of poetry and collections of prose are published by Faber and Faber, London. AS Among Schoolchildren: A Public Lecture Given By Seamus Heaney on 9 June 1983 (Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast, 1984) DC District and Circle DD Door into the Dark DN Death of a Naturalist EI ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’, Irish University Review, Vol. 15, No. 1. Spring (1985). EL Electric Light FK Finders Keepers FW Field Work GT The Government of the Tongue HC Human Chain HL The Haw Lantern N North P Preoccupations PW The Place of Writing (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1989) RP The Redress of Poetry SI Station Island SL The Spirit Level SS Stepping Stones ST Seeing Things WO Wintering Out 1. Heaney and Enlightenment: Introduction In 1982, RTÉ produced a television documentary entitled Joyce, Yeats and Wilde: Seamus Heaney and Richard Ellmann in Conversation. Though the programme was intended to celebrate three of Ireland’s most internationally recognised writers, it is not difficult to see how RTÉ’s producers were acutely aware of the significance of a conversation between Heaney and Ellmann recorded at various landmarks around Dublin city. At that juncture, Ellmann was established as the preeminent biographer of James Joyce, as well as an authority on W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde, while Heaney—who had moved south ten years before— had confirmed his status as a major poet with the publication of his highly controversial book, North, in which he addresses the wave of politically motivated violence that struck Northern Ireland from the late 1960s. The sense of occasion permeating the documentary, then, owed as much, if not more, to the interlocutors themselves as it did to their putative subject. One particularly significant part of the conversation is when Heaney and Ellmann, stood together at Sandymount Green, discuss Yeats’s poetic legacy. Ellmann refers to Heaney’s essay, ‘Yeats as an Example?’—published only two years earlier in Preoccupations—and invites him to elaborate on its terms. Heaney begins with a general appreciation of Yeats’s accomplishments (‘Yeats had the gift of establishing authority first of all by achievement, but secondly by a conduct which was majestic in some way’), but he concludes with a judgement that expresses his own priorities at that time: ‘I think that the poet has to not get caught in a position where he is answerable to the politician, but where in some way the politician is under his spiritual gaze’.1 Only three years earlier Heaney had published Field Work, his fifth book of poetry, which, given its focus on ‘mysteries’ (FW 43), 1 Seamus Heaney, quoted in Joyce, Yeats and Wilde: Seamus Heaney and Richard Ellmann in Conversation, RTÉ Productions, 1982. Ronald Schuchard has also partly transcribed the documentary in his introduction to The Place of Writing (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1989), pp. 2-16, p. 11. 1 seems very much part of his attempt to develop such a
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