Remembering Seamus Heaney

During my first weeks as managing editor for Ploughshares, Seamus Heaney’s transatlantic writing issue, 6/1, arrived from the printer, ready to be bagged and mailed to subscribers. Michael Mazur’s monotype portrait of Heaney had appeared on the cover of 5/3, accompanying an interview by issue editor Jim Randall, just as Heaney began his decades of teaching at Harvard; Heaney would go on to edit the Spring 1984 issue of Ploughshares. Before he was “famous Seamus,” Heaney’s compass as a poet and generosity as a reader were recognized by those of us privileged to work with him at the magazine. Afterward, he did not change.

His generosity was among the qualities that made him a creator of community wherever, and in whatever capacity, he moved. Asked by Randall whether the Troubles had caused a sudden flourishing of poets in Belfast, Heaney replied, “Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby were students of mine at the University and although I’m not saying that my class was a big influence on them as poets, I think they got some self-confidence in seeing a member of their own community on the University staff and publishing books.” Heaney did for the Belfast poets what writers such as Adrienne Rich and Gwendolyn Brooks did for women and writers of color in the US. He gave them confidence in their own voice, marking a claim for their poetry within the broader culture while distinguishing a community in which they could thrive.

I remember a benefit for Ploughshares at the Blacksmith House, May 10, 1982, for which Heaney read with four other issue editors—Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur, Lloyd Schwartz, and Jane Shore (thanks to Lloyd for supplying the date, program, and readers). Seamus read part of “Station Island” that night, a poem that raises the skin on the back of my neck every time. He also read his version of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno. Seamus had published his translation of Cantos XXXII and XXXIII as “Ugolino” in Field Work, and would contribute his new translation to an anthology by twenty contemporary poets edited by Daniel Halpern at Ecco Press. When he reached the lines introducing Dante to his guide Virgil, Seamus looked at his audience as if to include us among the poets, to suggest that we shared a task, and that our traffic with circumference and awe could be as terrible and exalted as Dante’s was with Virgil. How to describe the electric current in that room, the dedication aroused by the words spoken in English by an Irishman, written six hundred-odd years ago by a Florentine, and heard by a group of writers alive in twentieth-century Cambridge? It was a moment of transport—and a moment that acknowledged that a group of poets as various in their work as fellow readers Bidart, Mazur, Schwartz, and Shore were bound to a common purpose.

I didn’t know Seamus well, though he felt he knew me well enough to “recommend the poet and the poems” when I applied for a fellowship to complete a second book. A man without airs or snobbishness, he shaped those who read him into more inclusive readers. For those wary of mixing politics with poetry, his poems were as political as they were humane. For those skeptical of the canon, alert to those whose stories were left out, he translated Beowulf, finding in the Old English word meaning “to suffer” his aunt’s phrase “to thole,” disarming the “Irish/English duality, the Celtic/Saxon antithesis.” In his signature poem “Digging,” the pen begins as a sword and ends as a ploughshare. His life and writing were a piece.