routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

478 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney in
1995 set the seal on his worldwide reputation as the major Irish poet of
the second half of the twentieth century, and, indeed, as one of the
finest poets writing in the English language. It was the volume of poems
North (1975) which established Heaney’s fame and popularity, after
Door Into the Dark (1969). More recent collections of verse have
examined the ‘bog people’, the poet’s own relationships, and the complex
relationships between individual and society, cult and history. In these
lines from the poem North the poet looks back to the hidden imperial
roots of the English language in Viking Ireland and Norse culture:
‘Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
in the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
In the long foray
But no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
As the bleb of the icicle,
Trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
Your hands have known.’
In his essays and academic writings, Seamus Heaney is perceptive,
and sometimes polemical. He is particularly acute in his writings on
poets and poetry. His early lecture Yeats as an Example? ends with words
of praise for one of Yeats’s last poems, Cuchulain Comforted: words
which might, in some way, also stand for Heaney’s own creative work.
It is a poem deeply at one with the weak and the strong of this
earth, full of a motherly kindness towards life, but also unflinching
in its belief in the propriety and beauty of life transcended into
art, song, words.
Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill share a concern with time, history,
tradition, and place. Tomlinson’s The Way of the World (1969) and The