Word: heaneys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have often passed Seamus Heaney making his way up the incline of Plympton St. towards the Yard and wondered what he was doing in Cambridge. The broadbacked poet looks as though he should be among the gnarled stiles of an Irish hillside, not the parking meters of a street in Harvard Square...
...Heaney's poetry, though, has never really left Ireland, despite the fact that its author has been Boylston professor of rhetoric here for the past six years. Unlike William Butler Yeats, whose far-roving mind soon strayed from the lake isle of Innisfree, Heaney is a stationary poet, taking few side-trips to Cambridge or California, let alone Byzantium. His verses are circumscribed by the ancient parameters of the Celtic-Norse world, borders that almost everyone else has forgotten...
...call Heaney's poems circumscribed is not to say that they are in any way of merely parochial or national interest. His newest book, a selection of poems written over the first two decades of his career, proves concisely and convincingly that Heaney deserves to be ranked with Yeats not just as an Irish poet, but as a voice of persistent and international relevance...
...fact, it is precisely because of the limits he places on his poetic demesne that Heaney gains an almost unlimited expressive control. For instead of moving outwards, he burrows "inwards and downwards," sifting the Irish soil and Irish soul for meaning and metaphor, retraversing locales and themes until the subtlest shifts and shadings take on great meaning. He delves, too, into his own and his country's past and finds them richly veined with continuities...
Fundamental to Heaney's success is his ability to recreate his native landscape on the page. The smoothness of the hills and the scuff of gravel under thick-soled shoes make themselves felt not just in the words' literal meaning but in the assonance and consonance of their sound. It is a world whose outer forms are rounded, full with what lies beneath. This external landscape then becomes a thing to be explored, dug into, its inner forms revealed...