Seeing ‘Last Things’: Reading Yeats through the Eyes of Seamus Heaney

Abstract

IN 1978, SEAMUS HEANEY in a public lecture entitled ‘Yeats as an Example?’ argued that Yeats, through his perseverance, invention, and artistic commitment, is ‘indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age’. Twelve years later, in the Oxford lecture ‘Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin’, Yeats is cast as the ideal example for a poet approaching later middle age: one who might be beginning to contemplate his own (if still distant) last things, or at least conducting some mid-career literary stock-taking.¹ From the publication in 1980 of Preoccupations (which takes its title and epigraph from Yeats’s Explorations) to the recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech Crediting Poetry (1995), Yeats might be thought to have ghosted Heaney’s prose: he is frequently invoked and often implictly addressed, hovering in the writing like an admixture of Bloom’s precursor poet and Bakhtin’s superaddressee. However, although a persistent presence—especially in Heaney’s essays, Yeats is also an unfixed one: Heaney, a seemingly committed literary revisionist, has, over the last two and a half decades, constructed different versions of Yeats—which, unsurprisingly, largely echo his own literary predilections.²