audience. He has written, translated and adapted a number of theatrical and oper-
atic scripts for international companies, and writes increasingly for theatre and film.
This theatrical extroversion lends a performative impact to his own verse, which
shows a bleakly Gothic range of emotions and a proclaimed and campaigning
commitment to the Northern working class. His upbringing contributes richly to his
idiom, which is often vulgar in the good sense of the word. Alienation from family
by education is rawly recorded in telling poems to his parents in The School of
Eloquence, as in ‘A Good Read’, ‘Illuminations’ and ‘Timer’:
Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.
Harrrison’s long spectacular v., made into a television film, became famous. The
title v. is short for versus, Latin ‘against’, as used in football fixtures such as ‘Leeds v.
Newcastle’; it also means ‘verse’. It is one of several letters sprayed on his parents’
gravestone by skinheads after a Leeds United defeat. The poem dramatizes personal
and cultural conflicts, giving poetry a rare public hearing. A less socially committed
poem, more finely expressive of Harrison’s relished gloom, is A Kumquat for John
Keats:
Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best
how days have darkness round them like a rind,
life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.Seamus Heaney
The fourth ‘H’ is Seamus Heaney(1939– ), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Liter ature in 1995. Heaney identifies himself not as British but Irish. He was born
into a rural Catholic family in Protestant Northern Ireland. Poems written out of the
experience of his own people can reflect this, as in ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ or
‘T he Ministry of Fear’, but he has never been simply partisan. The
Loyalist–Republican conflict in the North brought Ulster writing to wider notice.
Heaney has taken an Irish passport and lives in the Republic. His voice is Irish, as are
most of his subjects. But he writes in the language common to the British Isles. This
is not what these islands are commonly called in the Republic of Ireland, but, like
many Irish people, Heaney partakes in the everyday culture of the islands. His poems
mention London’s Promenade Concerts and BBC radio’s Shipping Forecast – as well
as British army checkpoints in Northern Ireland. He was a popular Professor of
Poetry at Oxford and has for three decades been the most widely read poet in
Britain.A former teacher, he believes in the role of the poet as public remembrancer,
and discharges the heavy responsibility of being the most celebrated of living poets
in Britain (and perhaps in America) with grace and generosity.
Early poems re-creating sights, sounds and events of his childhood won him
many readers;he writes well of his farming family, from whom his education at
Queen’s College, Belfast, did not separate him, and he still makes his living from the
land, since his mental and emotional world is rooted in the background of family
and farm. Where his fathers dug with spades, he digs with his pen (‘Digging’),
uncovering layers of Irish history, Gaelic, Viking and pre-historic. He has extended
his range to politics and literary ancestry without losing his way with language; for398 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80
Seamus Heaney(1939–)
Eleven Poems(1965), Death
of a Naturalist(1966), Door
into the Dark(1969), North
(1975), Field Work (1979),
Station Island(1980), The
Haw Lantern(1987), Seeing
Things (1991), The Spirit
Level(1996), Beowulf
(1999), Electric Light(2001),
District and Circle(2006),
Human Chain(2010).