I am grateful to Seamus Heaney, first and foremost, for all the invaluable poetry and prose that he has added to the store of literature in English. Over the years, both Seamus and Marie Heaney have courteously provided answers to questions I asked about the poems. Seamus Heaney kindly checked the Chronology of this book and provided the Discography. He has not read this manuscript: any errors remaining are mine alone.
My interest in Irish poetry arose first from a course in Victorian Poetry (including early Yeats) by Professor Morton Berman of Boston University; it was deepened by courses in modern Irish writing given at Harvard University by Professor John V. Kelleher, who directed my dissertation on Yeats and has generously supported my intellectual efforts ever since. I am also indebted to the Yeats Committee and the Directors of the Yeats International Summer School of Sligo, Ireland, where I first heard Seamus Heaney read his work in 1975.
Professor Frank Kermode, General Editor of the Fontana Modern Masters series, commissioned this book, which without him might not have existed in its present form. I am indebted to the editors of the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Cambridge Review and the Harvard Review, who, by inviting me over the years to write on Heaney’s work, have helped me in the preparation for this longer effort, though I do not quote here any of my earlier essays on Heaney. For my opportunity to write on Heaney in my Ellmann Lectures, The Breaking of Style, I thank Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University. In 1995, as the Charles Stewart Parnell Lecturer at Magdalene College, Cambridge, I lectured on Heaney in the welcoming atmosphere of the Irish Studies Colloquium, and participated in a public conversation with Seamus Heaney under the auspices of the college, where my kind host was Professor Eamon Duffy.
I am sincerely grateful for the work of the bibliographers, scholars, critics, editors of collections, journalists and interviewers who have discussed Heaney’s writing since he first began to publish. They have not only laid the basis for tracking Heaney’s allusions, his intellectual and poetic sources, and his development over time; they have also helped to create the terms – literary and political – in which his work has been hitherto discussed. Whether agreeing or disagreeing with them, I have found them serious and stimulating.
The Corporation of Yaddo granted me the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency for the summer of 1997, when I was engaged in writing this book. My thanks go to the Director of Yaddo, Dr Michael Sundell, and to my Harvard colleague, the poet Henri Cole, who sponsored my visit to Yaddo and thereby gave me an invaluable eight weeks of solitude, comfort and congenial company. The libraries of Harvard University and of Skidmore College have been indispensable to the completion of this book.
I am grateful to Faber & Faber for permission to quote at length from the poetry of Seamus Heaney, and to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for American permissions.
My sister and brother, and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, named on the dedicatory page, have warmly supported me in my writing, and have been happy for me in the results of that work. I thank them for their life-long affection and encouragement.