A History of English Literature

him words are also things, as they were for James Joyce. The inherited presence of a
different native tongue, Irish, Gaelic or Welsh, can give a special rhythm and body to
the use of English. Despite the Troubles, to which he attended, memorably in
‘Casualty’, he is never merely political. The anguished poem ‘Punishment’, likening a
sacrificial body found in a Danish bog to a victim of Republican punishment squads,
echoes also to cast stones and numbered bones from the Gospels.
Modern poets in English are more discreet with their literary allusions than the
modernists, and gentler on their readers. Heaney has always learned from other
writers – ‘Skunk’, for instance, humanizes a Robert Lowell poem which starts from
the same point. The volume Seeing Thingsdeals with the death of parents, marital
love and the birth of children. It is much concerned with the validity of the vision-
ary in reaching towards life after death. It opens with Virgil’s Golden Bough and
ends with Virgil explaining to Dante why Charon will not ferry him across the Styx.
These translations and preoccupations return poetry to classical sources and central
concerns with typical human destinies: a contrast with Larkin’s mistrust of the
‘myth-kitty’ and his sense of ‘solving emptiness’. Heaney’s work is a striking
reminder that poetry can play a humanizing role in civilisation.
It is striking also that Heaney, with other leading Anglo poets, Geoffrey Hill, the
Australian Les Murray and the West Indian Derek Walcott, looks increasingly
towards the realities of metaphysics, of religion, of presence. In defending the possi-
bilities of the sacred, these poets are quite opposed to the philosophical scepticism
of those Franco-American literary theorists who for two decades chilled the climate
in which literature was studied in academic institutions, abstracting the language of
criticism out of reach of intelligent general readers. A generation of post-Marxist

POETRY 399

Some Irish poets

Austin Clarke (1896–1974)

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967)

Thomas Kinsella (1929– )

John Montague (1929– )

Brendan Kenelly (1936– )

Seamus Heaney (1939– )

Michael Longley (1939– )

Seamus Deane (1940– )

Derek Mahon (1941– )

Eavan Boland (1944– )

Mebh McGuckian (1950– )

Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel Prize

winner for Literature. Johnny Eggitt/AFP/

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