Seamus Heaney’s collection North turns 50 next month, but does it still have relevance for today’s readers and critics? In advance of a major conference to mark the milestone at Queen‘s University Belfast, Stephen O’Neill reassesses the controversial anthology
Looking back on his career with Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones (2008), Seamus Heaney claimed that “The book of mine that came most intensely out of the first shock of the Troubles was North”. Published in June 1975, North was his fourth collection of poetry, and much of it was dedicated to finding a way of representing a conflict that was then not even a quarter of the way through. More than 1,300 people had already died in the Troubles by the time of its publication, and Heaney agonised over what poetry could or even should mean in this grim context.
As his conversations with O’Driscoll reflected, Heaney’s writing had to change in response to the onset of violence, a pressure which was not of his own making. Literature was now seen by some as a vehicle for finding truth from what seemed like the most intractable of conflicts. Suddenly, poetry had to make something happen.
In such a predicament, it is unsurprising that Heaney found an example in WB Yeats who, some five decades before, had written much of his modernist masterpiece The Tower (1927) amid the Irish revolution. Emulating Yeats’s seclusion at Thoor Ballylee, Heaney had beaten a retreat to the remote Irish countryside in the years before his collection was published, moving from his home on Belfast‘s Ashley Avenue to Glanmore Cottage in Wicklow.
The title was a nod to this deliberate alienation. Some of the impetus for this move had been gleaned from Heaney’s experiences as a visiting academic in Berkeley, California, where he witnessed Black Panther protests and met Conor Cruise O’Brien and Thomas Flanagan, all the while keeping an eye on the situation back home. The freelance life became too appealing. As he wrote to his prospective Wicklow landlord, the academic Ann Saddlemyer, he had realised that he wanted “to see how far it would be possible to live as a writer, I mean live with one’s imagination as well as by one’s pen”. This letter, written in a break during tutorials at Queen‘s University Belfast in January 1972, the week of Bloody Sunday, suggested that going freelance and solitary was good for his life and career.
By the summer of 1972, Heaney was out on his own, meditating often on his responsibility. Speaking of the outbreak of riots in the summer of 1969, which had accelerated the nascent Troubles, he claimed that “[f]rom that moment the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament”. These words came in a lecture entitled Feeling Into Words, which Heaney had given to the Royal Society of Literature in the autumn of 1974, and anticipated his forthcoming volume as a new development in his writing, even a coming-of-age.
Far from the dominance of childhood in Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first collection, his poetry was clearly rebranded as an attempt to write against the euphemisms that had already been imposed on a conflict so inadequately named the Troubles. As he told his London audience, these could be seen as a re-emergence of “the original heraldic murderous encounter between Protestant yeoman and Catholic rebel”, a reversion to “an archetypal pattern”. Echoing the words of Yeats, Heaney claimed that his task was now to find “befitting emblems of adversity”.
He found these icons in the bodies of sacrificial victims in Denmark and other parts of Northern Europe which were popularised by the 1969 translation of the archaeologist PV Glob‘s The Bog People, seeing in these bog bodies an analogy for the “neighbourly murder” of the Troubles. In The Grauballe Man, Strange Fruit, and Bog Queen, among others, these preserved atrocities were recast as a reminder that violence was a constant since time immemorial in Part One of North. In what would become perhaps the most scandalising poem of the volume, Punishment makes a comparison with the body of a sacrificial murder victim and the tarring and feathering of women who had relationships with British soldiers in Belfast and Derry.
In the final lines of the poem, the speaker admits that he would “connive / in civilised outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge”. Even today, reading the poem is an experience of profound uncertainty, of deep discomfort about where the speaker and the author of this poem stand – whether something is being explained or justified.
Feeling into Words clearly served notice that his writing had changed drastically in response to the conflict, and Punishment suggested this darker turn in his poetry. But Heaney would later warn against seeing North as exceptional. Looking back at the work some 50 years later, the volume marked significant transformations of Heaney’s poetry and his life, and the collection is patterned in a way that Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark (1969), and Wintering Out (1972) are not.
Divided into two parts, North was his most obviously ambitious work to date, a work that Heaney considered “oblique, intense, and fused at a very high pressure”. The reference to pressure at least partially acknowledged the weighty expectations about addressing the violence which were placed upon him by a beleaguered and expectant public. But the pressure also came from Heaney’s own ambition.
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These lofty aspirations were signposted throughout the allusions and dedications to other writers and artists in the collection, which gain more frequency in Part II. North is surrounded by an all-male cast of examples for the poet, with references to WB Yeats, Percy Shelley, William Shakespeare, among others, and perhaps most prominently the romantic Spanish painter Francisco Goya, who appears in the poem Summer 1969, part of a sequence entitled Singing School, in another homage to Yeats. Summer 1969 finds the speaker confused by the array of representations that surrounded him, sitting “through death-counts and bullfight reports | On the television” while reading Richard Ellman’s biography of another male comparator, James Joyce. He happens upon the Prado, where both Goya‘s depictions of the Peninsular War and his later gothic “dark paintings” of Greek myth, like the poetry collection, are divided into myth and history. These form a confusing array of emblems alongside the reportage of the Troubles, the paintings recast as a flattering comparison for North itself.
However, the story of North is not just about Heaney writing and collecting the poems that are contained within it, but also about the mixed response to it. Heaney won acclaim from major poets and poetry critics, particularly in Britain and the United States, with the Harvard Professor Helen Vendler considering it “one of the few unforgettable single volumes published in English since the modernist era”. The American poet Robert Lowell claimed it represented “a new kind of political poetry by the best Irish poet since WB Yeats”.
As the English critic Blake Morrison wrote, on its publication North “met with the kind of acclaim which, in Britain at least, we had ceased to believe poetry could receive”, with more than 6,000 copies sold in the first month alone. Poetry readings were now happenings, people crowding in to hear Heaney read: Morrison reported that “his audience at an early evening reading at the National Theatre in January 1977 was the biggest I have ever seen a poet command”.
With such unprecedented success also came savage criticism, where some accused Heaney of ambivalence towards violence, others of the endorsement of a tribal mentality. More to the point, some of these invectives came from younger poets who would have attended poetry workshops at Queen‘s given by Heaney in the 1960s.
In the Belfast-based magazine The Honest Ulsterman, his former student Ciaran Carson, later to be director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen‘s, infamously claimed that Heaney was found in North to be a mythmaker and an obscurantist, and even worse, that the poetry in the collection was not befitting of his talent. Later, those such as Patricia Coughlan would denounce the chauvinistic portrayal of women in the bog bodies sequence in particular.
This also says something about the moment of its publication: in the often ferocious debates over the interpretation of North – reading Heaney as chauvinist or genius – the collection brought out some of the best of a generation of Irish critics, including Coughlan and Carson, but also Edna Longley, Declan Kiberd, Neil Corcoran, David Lloyd, and Conor Cruise O’Brien. Whatever they said about North, they said something.
Fifty years on, North also remains a staple of undergraduate English literature modules in Ireland and elsewhere, in which the moment of its publication is as important for the poetry as it is for the context and the ferocity of its reception. A new generation of critics including Alison Garden and Gail McConnell at Queen‘s University Belfast, and Rosie Lavan at Trinity College Dublin, have re-examined the collection and individual poems from it in terms of other poets’ responses to them, the genesis of the allegories that the collection made, and the visual and material contexts into which Heaney wrote.
Of all of Heaney’s books, it also most frequently serves as a comparison if not an example for other poets. Lecturer at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, Stephen Sexton, had his own much-lauded first collection, If All the world and Love Were Young (2019), compared to Heaney’s fourth collection, particularly in relation to the use of myth and narrative. North still casts a deep shadow.
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At the North at 50 conference, to be held at the Seamus Heaney Centre from June 5th to 7th, a range of speakers from the United States, Norway, Britain, and Ireland are taking another look at the collection on the 50th anniversary of its publication. Including a keynote from Prof Nicholas Allen, and a closing round-table on the collection with contributions from Prof Edna Longley, Dr Eamonn Hughes, and the poets Prof Leontia Flynn and Dr Padraig Regan, the events will be a comprehensive reassessment of the book and its reception.
Other papers include genetic studies of North, considerations of parody in and of Heaney, and reflections on teaching Heaney at secondary schools. There will also be a screening of Heaney in Limboland (1970), a trad session, and a talk about the visual and sound archives in the Heaney collection at Queen’s University Belfast.
Stephen O’Neill is a Teaching Fellow in 20th Century Writing at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He is co-organising the North at 50 Conference with Dane Holt, Stephen Connolly and Rachel Brown from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast
