Abstract
This chapter examines how two very different relationships with dwellings are reflected in the work of the early modern English poet Edmund Spenser and the modern Irish poet Seamus Heaney: two writers widely separated in time but geographically linked by Ireland. It argues that, for Spenser, building is antecedent to writing: in consequence of his dubious title to Kilcolman Castle and its estate, the provisionality of the former enables the deliberation of the latter. In Heaney’s work, however, building is not antecedent to the writing of verse, but its equivalent: for Heaney, poetry ought not to outstrip the bricolage of building, but take it as its model. The chapter shows that the methods and circumstances by which built spaces were created from the imaginings of their inhabitants, changing the texture of writing itself.
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Notes
- 1.
Derived from the Irish word bó-dhún, ‘bawn’ in Elizabethan English denoted ‘a fortified enclosure, enceinte, or circumvallation’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. ‘bawn’).
- 2.
Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), ‘Introduction’, p. xxx. Heaney’s chronology of the composition of The Faerie Queene is a little impressionistic: the ‘early cantos’ were probably composed in the mid-1580s, while Kilcolman was burnt in 1598.
- 3.
Heaney, Beowulf, p. xxx.
- 4.
‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’, in The Shorter Poems, ed. by Richard McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 343–71 (p. 344).
- 5.
Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 655; The Minor Poems I, ed. by Charles Grosvenor Osgood and others, The Works of Edmund Spenser, A Variorum Edition, ed. by Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), vol. VII, p. 472.
- 6.
See Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 205.
- 7.
OED, s.v. ‘haphazard, n.’, sense A1.
- 8.
OED, s.v. ‘hazard, n.’, senses A2, A3.
- 9.
Ray Heffner, ‘Spenser’s Acquisition of Kilcolman’, Modern Language Notes, 46 (1931), 493–98 (p. 495).
- 10.
Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, p. 220.
- 11.
Kilcolman’s archaeology suggests that the great hall above the staircase was modified to create a parlour—the small private room whose popularity in the sixteenth century shows the increasing importance of privacy. On the trend towards privacy, see Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (London: Country Life Limited, 1966); Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547 (London: Yale University Press, 1993); and Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
- 12.
In some cases, they planned and built new towns, such as Ballybeg and Mallow. See Thomas Herron, Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 40.
- 13.
Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 70.
- 14.
George Buck, quoted in Girouard, Robert Smythson, ‘Introduction’, p. 19.
- 15.
Spenser, ‘A View of the Present State of Ireland’ [1596], in The Prose Works, Variorum, vol. X, p. 59, l. 487.
- 16.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutability: or, Spenser’s Irish Plot’, in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, pp. 93–115 (p. 101).
- 17.
Richard McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 17–20. The Irish aristocrats had recognised Henry VIII as their ‘lord’ in 1541, without directly submitting to his monarchical authority.
- 18.
Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, p. 204.
- 19.
Heaney first visited Harvard in 1979. From 1984 to 1995 he was Boylston Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric. He was Poet in Residence until 2006.
- 20.
Sophia Nguyen, ‘A New Life for Heaney’s Home at Harvard’, Harvard Magazine, 31 March 2015, https://harvardmagazine.com/2015/03/heaney-suite-dedication [accessed 5 November 2018].
- 21.
Heaney described himself to Frank Kinahan in 1982 as ‘Jungian in Religion’ in ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), 405–14 (p. 409). See also Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1986); Fran Brearton, ‘Heaney and the Feminine’, in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. by Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 73–91.
- 22.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland’, in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 112–33 (p. 112).
- 23.
Heaney, Door into the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 3–4.
- 24.
Heaney, Door into the Dark, p. 7.
- 25.
Heaney, Door into the Dark, p. 9.
- 26.
Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 18.
- 27.
‘Frontiers of Writing’, in The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 186–204 (p. 199).
- 28.
‘Frontiers of Writing’, p. 199. The eastern point of Heaney’s diamond is the Martello Tower in Dublin Bay, where Joyce’s Ulysses begins, which represents the attempt to Hellenize the island. Carrickfergus Castle in Co. Antrim, meanwhile, puts Heaney in mind of Louis MacNeice and his ability to combine in a single thought the British and Irish parts of his identity. The four look inwards to ‘the tower of prior Irelandness’, of Ireland’s ancient, pre-colonial past, in the centre of the island at Clonmacnoise.
- 29.
Adam Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 3.
- 30.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 109–19 (p. 118).
- 31.
Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (London: Perennial Library, 1975), pp. 141–59 (p. 157).
- 32.
‘Mossbawn’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), pp. 17–21 (p. 17).
- 33.
Greg Garrard, ‘Heidegger, Heaney and the Problem of Dwelling’, in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 167–81 (p. 172).
- 34.
Heaney, Door into the Dark, p. 10.
- 35.
OED, s.v. ‘couchant, adj.’, sense 2.
- 36.
Women in Heaney’s work, as feminist criticism has pointed out, are confined narrowly to archetypal or mythic roles. A related restriction of women in his early work is their exclusion from craft.
- 37.
Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, p. 23.
- 38.
Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, p. 37.
- 39.
Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, p. 12.
- 40.
Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 40.
- 41.
Heaney, Wintering Out, p. 14.
- 42.
Rachel Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 89–90.
- 43.
Buxton, Robert Frost, p. 95.
- 44.
‘Feeling Into Words’, Preoccupations, pp. 41–60 (p. 47).
- 45.
Charles Weston Prince, ‘Resonant Forms: Architecture in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 2000), p. 23.
- 46.
Heaney, ‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, in 150 Years of Architecture in Ireland: The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland 1839–1989, ed. by John Graby (Dublin: RIAI, 1989), pp. 69–72 (p. 69).
- 47.
Heaney, ‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, p. 69.
- 48.
Heaney, ‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, p. 70.
- 49.
Heaney, ‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, p. 70.
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Cornish, A. (2020). ‘His Midas Touch’: Building and Writing in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser and Seamus Heaney. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_10
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