Seamus Heaney: The Man, the Myth, the Making of a Poet
When you step into the Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition, the first words you see are the oft-repeated truth: “Seamus Heaney transforms the ordinary and makes it extraordinary.” After all, even the Nobel Prize committee recognised his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past” when awarding him the prize in 1995.[1]
But where did this way of seeing the world come from?
That phrase, ‘the living past of everyday miracles’, sounds strikingly like one of Heaney’s greatest inspirations: mythology. As he said himself, the more the world changed, and the more his religious faith waned with it, the more he felt the need to regain the “ordering Christian myth of ‘down there, up there, us in between.’”[2] In mythology, he regained that sense of structure.
The Man
For many of us, mythology extends only as far as being one more option in our parents’ ever-expanding catalogue of bedtime stories. For Heaney, however, it functioned as a kind of scaffolding; a framework for understanding the world. He once said that myths form “the longitude and the latitude of consciousness in the West, establishing the first lines of thought and feeling.”[3]
That is, for Heaney, as much as for the societies that created them, myths were never just stories. They were teaching tools, moral compasses, and ways of explaining existence, having wrestled with the universal concerns of humankind: good vs evil, life and death, the afterlife, the origin of the world, and even the nature of humanity itself. It’s no surprise, then, that many Irish writers have often drawn on mythology to bring a sense of universality to their work, using myth as a springboard to speak about their unique and uniquely Irish contexts.[4]
Heaney was no different. He took a myth and then reworked it to address the local, the personal, and the political – remaking the story anew. Much ink has been spilled tracing his fascination with the subject.[5] Here, rather than following the entire arc of his career, we return to the beginning. Drawing on drafts from Heaney’s personal archive, we will see the exact moment myth first enters his imagination and sets off his lifelong quest into that sacred realm of poetry.
The Myth
Although it is especially Heaney’s later work involving classical myths and legends which often receives its laurels, his mythological interest reaches back as early as his very first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). The closing poem of the collection, the beloved ‘Personal Helicon’, with its famous first line: “As a child, they could not keep me from wells…”, reveals where the mythic first struck. But to explain the connection, we must first explain the meaning of its title.
In our ordinary world, Mount Helicon is an average-sized mountain located in the Boeotian region of Greece. In the divine world of Greek myth, however, it was known as the home of the Muses, the goddesses of inspiration. An ancient Greek poet plagued by writer’s block was meant to journey up its hills, drink from its springs, and find creativity restored.
Here, through reinvention, Heaney performs his signature myth-making act: he takes this lofty classical image and relocates it to his humble birthplace – to the rural wells of County Derry with their smells “Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.” Those wells become his personal Helicon, his first descent into a creative underworld from which he sought inspiration.
The poem reflects his childhood habit of peering into their darkness, imagining what could be hiding within. In adulthood, he uses poetry to recover that sense of childhood wonder, that early curiosity which made his imagination run wild. And so, in the final line he declares, now:
“I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
By virtue of Heaney’s generosity in donating his archives to the National Library of Ireland in 2011, we can trace exactly how this idea occurred. Listen Now Again is built from these papers – early drafts, diaries, manuscripts, and letters – revealing the evolution of a poet in real time to our visitors.
Annotated typescript draft of ‘Personal Helicon’ (Seamus Heaney Literary Papers, 1963-2010, MS 49,493/8)
In an early draft of ‘Personal Helicon’, the poem bore a different title: ‘An Apprenticeship’, and its final stanza was also entirely different.
In it, Heaney writes of being “scolded”, warned he would drown if he kept leaning into wells, or, in less poetic words, if he pursued his curiosity and became an artist. Yet, as an “unwitting apprentice”, he could not help himself, he had “to rhyme”.
Like an epic hero sensing a call to adventure, he hesitates: the eldest child of nine, the son of a farmer, daring to imagine a different future. But when you look to the margins, you can literally see the moment myth enters his imagination:
Annotated typescript draft of ‘Personal Helicon’ (Seamus Heaney Literary Papers, 1963-2010, MS 49,493/8)
“When I read how the ancients thought that poets drank their poetry out of a well spring T̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶t̶a̶p̶h̶o̶r̶ (he crosses that word out) The myth was apt.”
With that correction, he finds the first rendition of that final line we know so well:
“In water, I had sought to see myself, To set the darkness echoing.”
Through myth, he begins to make sense of his vocation. Suddenly, it is not so incredulous to think that he could become a poet. By following in the footsteps that have stretched for millennia before him, he is simply choosing to abide by tradition.
The Making of a Poet
Read through this lens, the opening poem of his debut, the legendary ‘Digging’ begins to resemble a myth of its own.
In cultural history, a foundation myth describes the origins of things: whether of a city, a nation, or a lineage.[6] Think of Rome’s Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twins raised by a she-wolf that went on to found the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Such myths are important because they shape how societies understand themselves, and crucially, make themselves understood to others.
In ‘Digging,’ Heaney creates his own origin story, his own founding myth. He reflects on the generations before him – his father and grandfather – turfcutters working the land, yet declares a different destiny the Fates have spun for him:
“But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.”
Though Heaney honours the past, he breaks away from it to establish a new lineage: the pen instead of the plough. This is especially reflected in the figure of the ‘grandfather’, who in reality would have been his granduncle Hughie.[7] By invoking the grandfather instead, Heaney tweaks the factual to heighten the weight of the fictional, reinforcing both the inheritance and his subsequent departure. And so, with just one stroke, the roots of his own myth are laid: the epic of a farmer’s son turned poet, whose initiation, Death of a Naturalist, stands on two mythic pillars, one at its beginning and the other at its end.
Kleos
Heaney would go on to adapt the medieval Irish legend Buile Shuibhne as Sweeney Astray, rework the mythical pilgrimage in Dante’s Divine Comedy in his own poetic image, contemporise two of Sophocles’ Ancient Greek tragedies, translate what would become one of his most celebrated works, Beowulf, and render Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid into English just a month before he passed on into the Underworld. Further still, every one of his poetry collections from the first would contain at least one if not multiple mythic allusions to Ancient Greek or Roman, Irish, and even Igbo mythology.[8] What began at the mossy wells of County Derry grew into a tapestry of work through which mythology was woven in a steady thread. As Heaney once wrote: one function of myth is that “it puts us in touch with the eternal.”[9] Heaney, touched by the Muse in return, has allowed his readers to feel that same timeless current and through his life’s work, forever secured a place among the constellations.
Footnotes:
[1] The Nobel Committee’s citation has become famous in its own right. For more on Seamus Heaney’s 1995 Nobel Prize, including his Nobel Lecture, diploma, and more, see the Nobel Foundation’s page: Seamus Heaney – Facts - NobelPrize.org.
[2] See Dennis O'Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008), p. 295 - a wonderful book-length series of conversations with Heaney about his life, influences, and writing.
[3] Lorna Hardwick, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney,’ Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies, vol. 7 (2007).
[4] For instance, WB Yeats in poems like ‘Leda and the Swan’, Eavan Boland in ‘The Pomegranate’, and, of course, James Joyce’s mythic framework in Ulysses. For more on classical influences in Irish literature, see this handy database: Classical Allusions in Irish Literature.
[5] For a shorter introduction, see Dr Liam O’Rourke’s blog “Seamus Heaney and the Classics” on the NLI website. For a newspaper perspective, see James Campbell’s article “The Mythmaker” in The Guardian (26 May 2006). For a more in-depth study of myth in Seamus Heaney’s work, see Ian Hickey and Ellen Howley, Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking (2023).
[6] For a (very) short and accessible introduction to foundation myths, and myth in its many forms, see Robert A. Segal’s Myth: A Very Short Introduction (2015).
[7] Stepping Stones, p. 25.
[8] Listing every mythological reference in Seamus Heaney’s work would require a collection of its own. For the reference to Igbo mythology, see the poem ‘A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also’ from his ninth collection, The Spirit Level (1996), written for his friend and fellow student from Queen's University Belfast, the Nigerian scholar Donatus Nwoga.
[9] Heaney reflects on myth and the idea of poetic inspiration in his essay “Apt Admonishment: Wordsworth as an Example,” published in The Hudson Review 61, no. 1 (2008): 19–33.
Tuilleadh
