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Seamus Heaney and American Poetry DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Seamus Heaney and American Poetry Laverty, Christopher Award date: 2019 Awarding institution: Queen's University Belfast Link to publication Terms of use All those accessing thesis content in Queen’s University Belfast Research Portal are subject to the following terms and conditions of use • Copyright is subject to the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988, or as modified by any successor legislation • Copyright and moral rights for thesis content are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners • A copy of a thesis may be downloaded for personal non-commercial research/study without the need for permission or charge • Distribution or reproduction of thesis content in any format is not permitted without the permission of the copyright holder • When citing this work, full bibliographic details should be supplied, including the author, title, awarding institution and date of thesis Take down policy A thesis can be removed from the Research Portal if there has been a breach of copyright, or a similarly robust reason. If you believe this document breaches copyright, or there is sufficient cause to take down, please contact us, citing details. Email: [email protected] Supplementary materials Where possible, we endeavour to provide supplementary materials to theses. This may include video, audio and other types of files. We endeavour to capture all content and upload as part of the Pure record for each thesis. Note, it may not be possible in all instances to convert analogue formats to usable digital formats for some supplementary materials. We exercise best efforts on our behalf and, in such instances, encourage the individual to consult the physical thesis for further information. Download date: 04. Oct. 2021 Seamus Heaney and American Poetry Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD The School of Arts, English and Languages Queen's University Belfast 2018 Christopher Laverty BA (Hons.) MA Declaration I declare the following research is my original work, submitted to the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University, Belfast, for PhD. Christopher Laverty November 2018 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Fran Brearton for her advice and reassurance for the past three years as she supervised this thesis. My work has benefitted immeasurably from her knowledge, judgement, and imaginative suggestions. I would also like to thank Dr Philip McGowan for encouraging me to develop the ideas of my MA dissertation into this thesis. His advice and enthusiasm for this project has given me confidence I will bring forward into new challenges. I am also grateful to my family and especially my parents, Breige and Malachy Laverty, whose own hard work and faith in me has been an example and a source of strength. I would like to express thanks to my friends for their help and support for the past three years. I am particularly grateful to Hannah Loudon, whose generosity and assistance at the final hour was greatly appreciated. I dedicate this work to Peter Browne Murray for standing by me as I challenged myself. iii Abstract This thesis seeks to understand Heaney’s relationship with the American tradition by close attention to his intertextual relations with the US writers who influenced him, alongside a consideration of those he elides – and the reasons for such elision. The chapters that follow will show how the dominance of certain arguments in Heaney criticism – to which he himself has contributed – has limited critical understanding of the Irish poet’s US influences and his experiences in America. While Heaney’s American exemplars may be fewer in number and diversity than previously thought, this research demonstrates that they are greater in the intensity of their influence than existing criticism recognises. Though I contend that five American writers have influenced Heaney to a degree not yet understood – Frost, Ransom, Roethke, Lowell, and Bishop – this thesis will also consider over-estimations of the significance of other writers, as in the case of Heaney’s 1970-71 Berkeley residency, a point which is often misidentified as Heaney’s first confrontation with American writing. The existing critical argument assumes that American writing had, until then, been largely invisible to Heaney and that he approved of the Bay Area poetry he encountered; I suggest in Chapter One that these are inaccurate premises for a discussion of Heaney’s Californian experience. Rather, as Chapter Two evidences, the examples Heaney discovered in the 1950s and ’60s of Frost, Ransom, and Roethke formed the basis for a poetics that remains largely unchanged throughout the Irish poet’s career. Lowell and Bishop, though not key influences until later, were also discovered in the 1960s while Heaney was reading, teaching, and even publishing about American poetry before his Berkeley residency. Chapters Three and Four demonstrate how Lowell and Bishop provided examples serviceable to Heaney’s needs during different phases, becoming the enabling voices behind his public verse, firstly in the 1970s and later in the 1980s and ’90s. While Chapter Three argues that Heaney masks rather than loses his admiration for Lowell, as Lowell’s popularity waned, Chapter Four examines the degree to which he misreads Bishop, a poet who is now understood more sensitively than in her lifetime. Chapter Four concludes the thesis by arguing that Heaney’s misreading of Bishop, the only female poet to whom he gives significant praise, is in part a result of his need to fortify the poetic theory he originally drew from Frost, essentially rendering Bishop a shadow of his own self. iv Table of Contents List of Abbreviations . vi Introduction . 1 Chapter 1 ‘[A] centrally heated daydream’: Snyder, Bly, Ashbery I . 15 II . 38 Chapter 2 ‘Atlantic seepage’: Frost, Ransom, and Roethke I . 51 II . 53 III . 64 IV . 72 Chapter 3 ‘[s]houlder to shoulder’: Heaney and Lowell I . 89 II . 91 III . 101 Chapter 4 The ‘better judgement’ behind the ‘walk on air’: Heaney and Bishop I . 126 II . 130 III . 140 IV . 149 V . 156 Conclusion . 171 Bibliography . 176 List of Abbreviations for frequently cited works CP Crediting Poetry DD Door into the Dark DN Death of a Naturalist EBCP Elizabeth Bishop Complete Poems FK Finders Keepers FW Field Work GT Government of the Tongue HL The Haw Lantern N North P Preoccupations R The Redress of Poetry RLCP Robert Lowell Collected Poems SI Station Island SL The Spirit Level SS Stepping Stones ST Seeing Things WO Wintering Out vi Introduction In her 2012 study In Gratitude for All Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe, Magdalena Kay argues: Heaney’s critics insist on the American influence […] with a tenacity that is surprising given the lack of evidence for many such claims. The search for echoes of Gary Snyder and Robert Bly does not yield much fruit; the mention of Louis Simpson in ‘Making Strange’ hardly invites one to an influence study; Heaney’s great admiration for William Carlos Williams is certainly worth mentioning, yet Williams’s short lines sound nothing like Heaney’s drill-like stanzas of the 1970s.1 Kay’s observations highlight that, for too long, criticism has looked for the American element of Heaney’s achievement in the wrong places, due in large part to the dominance of certain theories that remain widespread in Heaney criticism. That these valid and overdue objections appear in a study of Heaney’s Eastern European influences only further underscores the need for an equivalent study on Heaney in relation to the American tradition. As the major studies on Heaney’s poetry began appearing in the 1980s and 1990s, critics expressed their sense that more attention should be given to the role the American tradition played in Heaney’s artistic development and professional success. Although commentators generally acknowledge that the American academy played a crucial role in shaping Heaney’s fortunes, more tangibly defining America’s significance in a comprehensive study of his poetry has never been attempted. Much of the difficulty lies in confronting the scale of the topic itself and the extent to which Heaney’s American success has defined him. In the introduction to a collection of essays published in 1986, Harold Bloom described Heaney as deserving ‘of the same attention as his strongest American contemporaries’;2 a decade later Durkan and Brandes noted Heaney’s ‘immense international scholarly reception’ and found he was already ‘one of the most often taught (contemporary) writers in England and perhaps in 1 Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for all Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012) p.131. 2 Harold Bloom, ed., Seamus Heaney: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), p.10. 1 the English-speaking world, notably in America.’3 His residencies at Berkeley 1970-71 and Harvard University, where he was on the faculty in various positions from 1979 until 2006, are the focus of much existing commentary and were emphasised in obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic following his death on 30 August 2013. Adrian Higgins’s comment in the Washington Post obituary that Heaney was ‘no longer an important Irish poet, but a writer with an international reputation’4 reflects the tendency to consider Heaney a figure of global significance, a status attained in part through the favourable treatment of the American academy and US market-forces. In 2001 the New Statesman reported that Heaney generated nearly two-thirds of all sales of contemporary poetry in the United Kingdom, a statistic the BBC reported as well.5 In America at the same time, 17,000 copies of the first edition of Electric Light (2001) were printed, compared to only 6,000 for Field Work (1979) that was published there in 1981.6 In 2009, Patrick Crotty observed that ‘only the ultra-canonical Yeats, Eliot and Auden have enjoyed the sort of High Street profile that brought Heaney’s Beowulf and District and Circle into the hardback non-fiction best sellers’.7 For Crotty, Heaney’s international fame makes the achievement of Frost and Hughes – with whom his success is often compared – appear ‘national rather than global’; thus Heaney ‘cuts a singular figure’8 in the poetic world.
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