"The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances"

Description

The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances brings together sixteen of the most prominent scholars who have written on Seamus Heaney to examine the Nobel Prize winner’s later poetry from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to Heaney’s early and middle poems—the Bog Poems in particular—this book focuses on the poetry collected in Heaney's Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010) as a thematically connected set of writings. The starting point of the essays in this collection is that these later poems can be grouped in terms of style, theme, approach, and intertextuality. They develop themes that were apparent in Heaney’s earlier work, but they also break with these themes and address issues that are radically different from those of the earlier collections.

The essays are divided into five sections, focusing on ideas of death, the later style, translation and transnational poetics, luminous things and gifts, and usual and unusual spaces. A number of the contributors see Heaney as stressing the literary over the actual and as always looking at the interstices and positions of liminality and complexity. His use of literary references in his later poetry exemplifies his search for literary avatars against whom he can test his own ideas and with whom he can enter into an aesthetic and ethical dialogue. The essayists cover a great deal of Heaney’s debts to classical and modern literature—in the original languages and in translations—and demonstrate the degree to which the streets on which Heaney walked and wrote were two-way: he was influenced by Virgil, Petrarch, Milosz, Wordsworth, Keats, Rilke, and others and, in turn, had an impact on contemporary poets. This remarkable collection will appeal to scholars and literary critics, undergraduates as well as graduate students, and to the many general readers of Heaney's poetry.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• Electric light (disambiguation)
• The Spirit Level
• Seeing Things
• Human Chain
• District and Circle
• Irish poetry
• The Troubles
• Irish
• English
• Poetry
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Seamus Heaney
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780268100230
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE SOUL EXCEEDS ITS CIRCUMSTANCES
THE SOUL EXCEEDS ITS CIRCUMSTANCES
The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney
EDITED BY
Eugene O Brien
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
NOTRE DAME, INDIANA
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2016 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O Brien, Eugene, 1958- editor of compilation.
Title: The soul exceeds its circumstances : the later poetry of Seamus Heaney / edited by Eugene O Brien.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032982 (print) | LCCN 2016041886 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268100209 (hardback) | ISBN 0268100209 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780268100223 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268100230 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Heaney, Seamus, 1939-2013-Criticism and interpretation. | Heaney, Seamus, 1939-2013-Literary style. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry.
Classification: LCC PR6058.E2 Z886 2016 (print) | LCC PR6058.E2 (ebook) | DDC 821/.914-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032982
ISBN 9780268100230
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
To Seamus and Marie Heaney
To school the intelligence and make it a soul
And to the memory of our colleague
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Eugene O Brien
PART I. Heaney and Death
1 Surviving Death in Heaney s Human Chain
Andrew J. Auge
2 Death and Everyman: Imagining a Not Unwelcoming Emptiness
Magdalena Kay
3 Squarings
Helen Vendler
PART II. Heaney s Later Style
4 The Freed Speech of Equivocal Words : Seamus Heaney s Door into the Light
Michael R. Molino
5 Happening Once for Ever: Heaney s Late Style
Neil Corcoran
6 The Whole of Me A-Patter : Image, Feeling, and Finding Form in Heaney s Late Work
Meg Tyler
PART III. Translation and Transnational Poetics
7 Renewed, Transfigured, in Another Pattern : Metaphor and Displacement in Seamus Heaney s Human Chain
Michael Parker
8 The Reluctant Transatlanticist: Like a Weeping Willow Inclined to the Appetites of Gravity
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews
9 Crediting Marvels or Taking Responsibility: Vocation and Declarations of Intent by Seamus Heaney after Seeing Things
Bernard O Donoghue
PART IV. Luminous Things and Gifts
10 Seamus Heaney s Gifts
Henry Hart
11 Deep Down Things : The Inner Lives of Things in Later Heaney
Richard Rankin Russell
12 Door into the Light : The Later Poems of Seamus Heaney
Stephen Regan
PART V. Usual and Unusual Spaces
13 Scatter-Eyed / And Daunted : The Matrixial Gaze in Seeing Things
Moynagh Sullivan
14 Beyond Maps and Atlases : Transfiguration and Immanence in the Later Poems of Seamus Heaney
Daniel Tobin
15 The Poetics of Reverie and Revelation in the Last Poems
Rand Brandes
16 The Door Stands Open : Liminal Spaces in the Later Heaney
Eugene O Brien
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index
ABBREVIATIONS
Chapters 4 , 10 , and 11 use the pagination of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux editions. The rest of the chapters use the pagination of the Faber editions of the collections.
AH
Anything Can Happen
B
Beowulf
BT
The Burial at Thebes
CP
Crediting Poetry
CT
The Cure at Troy
DC
District and Circle
DD
Door into the Dark
DN
Death of a Naturalist
EL
Electric Light
FK
Finders Keepers
FW
Field Work
GT
The Government of the Tongue
HC
Human Chain
HL
The Haw Lantern
MV
The Midnight Verdict
N
North
OG
Opened Ground
OL
An Open Letter
P
Preoccupations
PD
Place and Displacement
PPP
Place, Pastness, Poems
PW
The Place of Writing
RP
The Redress of Poetry
SI
Station Island
SL
The Spirit Level
SS
Stepping Stones
ST
Seeing Things
WO
Wintering Out
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this book came as I was compiling a bibliographic entry for the Oxford Online Bibliography project on Seamus Heaney. Having written three books on Heaney, I felt that I was au fait with all of the work done on him and was quite surprised that his later work was critically underanalyzed. It was with this in mind, and on something of a whim, that I sent off a series of e-mails to the major scholars who have written on Heaney over the years, suggesting a book on Heaney s later poetry. It was gratifying to note that the replies were positive, and the process began. So, my first thanks is to my cocontributors. I think it is fair to say that they are the major figures in Heaney studies, and it has been a joy to work with them. Reading the essays was instructive, and together these essays make a significant contribution to the study of one of the greatest poets in the language. The essays were a pleasure to read and required little or no editing-the project was a joy. The University of Notre Dame Press was also a joy to work with, with readers seeing the value of the work, and with an affirming editor in Stephen Little, whose enthusiasm for the project was heartening. Elisabeth Magnus did a wonderful job copyediting what is a large book, and the finished product is cleaner, sharper, and more coherent thanks to her work. Rebecca De-Boer was a careful, organized, and very supportive editor whose work on processing the manuscript has improved it immeasurably.
However, in all joy there is sadness. In the compiling of this book, Seamus Heaney died, and the world is the poorer for his absence. I think he would have liked this book, and it is my hope that the scholarship contained here does justice to the texts that are analyzed and studied, and to his complex and sustaining view of the place of the aesthetic in our lives as human beings. His daughter Catherine, with whom I have worked on this and another book, has been the soul of courtesy and help, and it has been a pleasure working with her (I promise to stop bugging her with questions now). A further shock to the system came with the news of the death of one of our contributors, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews. Elmer was a fine scholar and a lovely man, and he, and his work, will be missed. It was a pleasure to meet and work with someone whose writing on Heaney I had long admired.
Personally, I must thank my colleagues in Mary Immaculate College, and our president, Professor Michael Hayes, who has inaugurated an Institute for Irish Studies and who is a strong supporter of the work being done in the college in Irish studies. The new structures have made Mary Immaculate College a sustaining environment for the work that I do, and I am grateful for this. I would like to offer special thanks to Professor Mick Healy, associate vice president for research, for his support and his help in the preparation of this book. My own colleagues in the Department of English Language and Literature, by their efficiency and hard work, have allowed me the time to work on this project, and I thank them: Linda McGrath, John McDonagh, Maria Beville, Marita Ryan, Anne O Keeffe, Kathryn Laing, Deirdre Flynn, Margaret Healy, Joan O Sullivan, E in Flannery, and Donna Mitchell.
Finally, my wife ine has always been the main supporter of my work, and her conversation, questions, comments, and encouragement have been invaluable as ever. My children, Eoin, Dara, and Sin ad, have been a source of fun, joy, and laughter in the process of writing this book, and I thank them for making my life better and brighter through their presence. A lot of this book was edited at home, and ine, Eoin, Dara, and Sin ad are integral parts of it, however hauntological those parts might be.
It is my contention that the later poetry of Seamus Heaney is among the finest to be written in the English language, and the aim of this book was to help to demonstrate this to be the case. It is up to others to decide whether the book succeeds in this aim or not; for me, the pleasure has been in its construction and execution, and I am now more convinced than ever of the value of a poetry that very definitely allows the soul to exceed its circumstances.
I NTRODUCTION
Eugene O Brien
The death of Seamus Heaney in August of 2013 was the passing of one of the most revered literary figures in the world. Encomia to his life and art, his humility and generosity, his sense of the ethical and the aesthetic, have resounded throughout the global media. He has been that rare phenomenon, an artist who is popular among audiences as well as being studied to the very highest level within the academy. Indeed, he has been seen as a national poet, though the term has not been used as often as one might think, and there are reasons for this. Moynagh Sullivan notes that the very notion of a national poet in Ireland initiates a crisis because it involves a denial of the boundary that separates the island and that such terms need to be used with nuance and care as t