Introduction
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Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 1 Introduction While a literary scene in which the provinces revolve around the centre is demonstrably a Copernican one, the task of talent is to re- verse things to a Ptolemaic condition. The writer must re-envisage the region as the original point. —Heaney, “The Regional Forecast” Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind. —Heaney, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland SEAMUS HEANEY’S REGIONAL IMAGINATION Seamus Heaney observed, “John Keats once called a poem [of his] ‘a little Region to wander in,’”1 and notions of the region lie at the heart not only of his concept of poetry but also of his understanding of politics, culture, and spirituality. Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired 1 © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 2 2 SEAMUS HEANEY’S REGIONS the 1995 Nobel Prize winner to become a poet, while his home region of Northern Ireland produced the subject matter for much of his poetry, which explores, records, and preserves both the disappearing agrarian life of that region and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and then the out- break of the “Troubles” there beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the late 1990s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that had long beset this region, and by extension the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom, would be synthesized and resolved. There was a third region he committed himself to explore—the spirit region, that world be- yond our ken—and many of his poems, essays, and other works also probe the boundaries of this region. Heaney’s regions—the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one—offer the best entrée into and unified understanding of his tremen- dous body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. There is a rough trajectory across these three regions toward the spiritual, which seems natural, as the poet had aged and survived a major stroke in August 2006, but often these three regions interpenetrate and inform each other. In his early seventies, for instance, he continued to write of his childhood region along with incidents in the Northern Irish Troubles, even as he dreamt of rapprochement in the North and imagined the spirit region in the long sequence from Human Chain (2010) entitled “Route 110.” In Heaney’s hands notions of the region and regionalism reached their full - est and most profound development in literary history, as he explored these three regions through a variety of genres and forms, perhaps most su - premely through his adaptation of Dante’s inherently regional form of terza rima into his particular tercet variant on that form, which itself be- came his chosen “region” to dwell in. In 1983, Seamus Deane, a contemporary of Heaney’s from Northern Ireland, argued in an important, albeit somewhat misleading essay, “The Artist and the Troubles,” that writers of Heaney’s generation, particularly those from the Catholic minority in the North, faced particular pressures to engage with the recent conflict in the province. He further held that Heaney, in particular, had done so by drawing on both an immediate con- cept of the region and a transcendent one: © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 3 Introduction 3 Seamus Heaney’s work, which began in a regionalism of the kind which had seemed to have passed with [painter William] Conor and [novelist and short-story writer Michael] McLaverty, suddenly expanded into the historical dimension with Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) with such incandescent energy and force that it was immediately clear that here, in this work, the Northern imagination had finally lost its natural stridency (replaced by patience) and had confronted its violent origins. Heaney’s best work is a contemplation of root and origin—of words, names, stories, practices, of violence itself. In him, Ulster regionalism realizes itself most fully and, in so doing, transcends itself.2 Unfortunately, Deane’s contention that Heaney’s first two books were es- sentially ahistorical is patently false: both Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969) do not celebrate a bucolic, timeless ideal of Ire- land but bear witness to its nightmarish history. The narrative of that par- ticular violent history of the North of Ireland is then amplified and ex- panded in Wintering Out and North as Heaney turns increasingly to other northern societies such as ancient Denmark, in order to draw parallels with the intimate violence then being committed within and outside the “tribes” of contemporary Northern Ireland. Deane does not clarify or elu- cidate his last, telling remark about Heaney’s best work being the apogee of Ulster realism yet also transcending it, but I would posit that a truer sentence has never been written about Heaney’s regionalism. As Heaney himself stated, “Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.”3 This project takes up Deane’s articulation of how Heaney’s earlier work enables the fullest realization of “Ulster regionalism” and transcends it, a crucial endeavor not only for fully appreciating the trajectory of Heaney’s work but also for understanding, by extrapolation, how it both reflects the peril and promise of divided Northern Ireland and anticipates its eventual emergence from the dark days of the Troubles into a less divided society that nonetheless remains riven with sectarianism. This sort of regionalism accords with that called for by the poet John Montague: “The real position for a poet is to be a global-regionalist. He is born into allegiances to particu - lar areas or places and people, which he loves, sometimes against his will. But then he also happens to belong to an increasingly accessible world. © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 4 4 SEAMUS HEANEY’S REGIONS So the position is actually local and international.”4 As Dennis O’Driscoll has observed, “This attitude is alert to the political, economic and envi- ronmental upheavals which uproot people and force them into new imagi - native relationships with their native places. The universal informs the par ticular and vice versa.”5 Regionalism as Heaney imagined it played a crucial role in this devolution of the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland and in the development of his own work. Writing in the mid-1980s about the poet John Crowe Ransom, who hailed from the American South, Heaney precisely articulates why he has devoted so much of his literary criticism to the work of regional writers— to affirm his own regional body of work and to connect it to that of other regional writers. He first points out that “Ransom was at a detached angle to what he cherished. He was in two, maybe three places at once: in the parochial south, within the imposed Union, and inside the literary ‘mind of Europe.’”6 So too had Heaney been at such a “detached angle”: he was fully of his local parish, but he grew up within the “imposed Union” of Northern Ireland and the rest of Great Britain and increasingly dwelled within the “literary ‘mind of Europe,’” as his later deep reading in the work of the Italian poet Dante and the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz shows. Be- cause he occupied such places, sometimes simultaneously, Heaney found it helpful to turn to similar writers who had done so successfully, like Ran- som. In this same essay, he further argues that because of his peripheral position the southern poet took on “poetic challenges and their resolutions [that] were tactical, venturesome, and provisional,” concluding, “His plight was symptomatic of the double focus which the poet from a regional cul- ture is now likely to experience, caught between a need to affirm the cen- trality of the local experience to his own being and a recognition that this experience is likely to be peripheral to the usual life of his age. In this situ- ation, the literary tradition is what links the periphery to the centre— wherever that imaginary point may be—and to other peripheries.”7 Thus the poet from a region with such multiple allegiances must turn to “the lit- erary tradition” to affirm the importance of “local experience” that is often rendered peripheral, especially in our own increasingly homogenized and homogenizing world—and to link that experience to those of others who similarly value local culture. Although Heaney’s immersion in the local rural life of southern County Derry in the 1940s and 1950s likely contributed more than any other fac- © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Russell-00intro_Layout 1 5/8/14 4:41 PM Page 5 Introduction 5 tors to his positive, complex view of the region, regional literary exemplars such as Robert Frost (with some qualifications), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Kavanagh, and Ted Hughes actually led him to start writing po- etry seriously in the 1960s and to consider his home ground as a positive and natural source for that poetry. In the 1970s, he pointed out that “sev- eral poets in the English tradition have nurtured me—Frost, Hopkins[,] and Ted Hughes, for example.”8 Later, in his lecture Room to Rhyme, he re- lated the story in the Venerable Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the En - glish People” about the first English poet, Caedmon, who received his call to become a poet relatively late in life and linked his own vocation to hearing regional voices from Ireland and Britain: At the relatively advanced age of twenty-three, I heard the equivalent of the voice [from Caedmon’s dream] telling me to make room to rhyme and to sing.