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“The Nest Kept Warm”: Heaney and the Irish Soldier-Poets

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The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914

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Abstract

This chapter seeks to redress a critical imbalance in perceptions of Seamus Heaney’s canonical debt to Great War poetry. The choice of an Irish subject and discussion that avoids the centrality of the Anglo-centric canon is also part of a broader attempt to disrupt and interrogate the more established literary vernaculars of Great War verse. I seek to examine more closely the “active ingredient” available to Irish poetry as a result of its problematized and yet contested relationship to the conflict which involves examination of the work of several Irish soldier-poets. For Irish National Party soldiers and serving Loyalists, their sacrifice was intended to produce mutually exclusive political outcomes which endure because of the problematized consequences of a divided Ireland and latter-day conflict in the North.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Thomas MacGreevy, “De Civitate Hominum,” ll 16–18. In Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of IrishWar Poetry1914–1945, edited by Gerald Dawe (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2008), 91.

  2. 2.

    Seamus Heaney, “Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker,” In The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), xvi.

  3. 3.

    Seamus Heaney quoting Wallace Stevens in “Frontiers of Writing,” from The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 190.

  4. 4.

    Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, xiii.

  5. 5.

    Jim Haughey, TheFirst World Warin Irish Poetry (USA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 246.

  6. 6.

    Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 193.

  7. 7.

    Haughey, 254.

  8. 8.

    This is only the broadest survey of such criticism. Brearton points out that, “Heaney has been castigated, variously, for being too political, or not political enough, praised on the one hand for finding a ‘befitting emblems of adversity’, for crossing boundaries, damned on the other for writing poetry at once ‘damagingly gendered’, disingenuous, dangerously emotive, and finally tendentious.” She goes on to provide a good round-up of such criticism in a lengthy footnote on page 218 of her book.

  9. 9.

    Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 222.

  10. 10.

    Brearton, 222–223.

  11. 11.

    Gerald Dawe, Of War And War’s Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing, “All the strains criss-cross” (Cork: Cork University Press, 2015), 59.

  12. 12.

    Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 190.

  13. 13.

    Heaney, “Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker,” from The Government of the Tongue, xxi.

  14. 14.

    Seamus Heaney, “Introduction” Francis Ledwidge: Selected Poems (Dublin; New Island Books, 1992), 11.

  15. 15.

    Brearton, 222.

  16. 16.

    Heaney, “Introduction” Francis Ledwidge: Selected Poems, 19.

  17. 17.

    Heaney, “Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker,” from The Government of the Tongue, xxii.

  18. 18.

    Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986), 185.

  19. 19.

    Heaney, “Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker,” from The Government of the Tongue, xx.

  20. 20.

    Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), 56.

  21. 21.

    Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 193.

  22. 22.

    Heaney, “Introduction,” 20.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    See Eavan Boland’s series of Irish Times articles on the subject from August 1970.

  25. 25.

    Brearton, 225.

  26. 26.

    Brearton, 226.

  27. 27.

    Neil Corcoran, “Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary” (Yearbook of English Studies, 17, 1987), 120.

  28. 28.

    Bernard O’Donoghue, Introduction, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (Hemel Hempstead; Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 1.

  29. 29.

    Gerald Dawe, “Delayed Honour: the Irish war poets,” Irish Times, May 5, 2015.

  30. 30.

    Desmond Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1 (Dublin: ELO Publications, 1991).

  31. 31.

    Haughey, 254.

  32. 32.

    Heaney, “Introduction,” 12.

  33. 33.

    Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, xx.

  34. 34.

    Brearton, 229.

  35. 35.

    Seamus Heaney, “Punishment,” North (1992, rpt; London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 30–31.

  36. 36.

    Edna Longley, “Inner Émigré” or “Artful Voyeur?” Seamus Heaney’s North, from Poetry in the Wars, 154.

  37. 37.

    Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, xv.

  38. 38.

    The Ways of War, Tom Kettle & Mary (Sheehy) Kettle, 3–4.

  39. 39.

    Letter to Joseph Devlin, The Ways of War, Tom Kettle & Mary (Sheehy) Kettle, 34.

  40. 40.

    Ledwidge, Letter to Lewis Chase, June 6, 1917.

  41. 41.

    Francis Ledwidge, “The Irish in Gallipoli,” Gerald Dawe, ed. Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of IrishWar Poetry1914–1945 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2008), 83.

  42. 42.

    Thomas Kettle, “To my Daughter, Betty, the Gift of God,” Gerald Dawe, ed. Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of IrishWar Poetry1914–1945 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2008), 55.

  43. 43.

    Haughey, 73.

  44. 44.

    Gerald Dawe, Irish Times, May 5, 2015.

  45. 45.

    Haughey, speaking of McGill’s poetry, 110.

  46. 46.

    “Englands of the Mind,” from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2000, 77.

  47. 47.

    James Randall, “An Interview with Seamus Heaney,” Ploughshares 5, no. 3 (1979), 17.

  48. 48.

    Heaney, “Introduction,” 19.

  49. 49.

    Seamus Heaney, “Punishment,” North, 30–31.

  50. 50.

    Ploughshares, 16.

  51. 51.

    Francis Ledwidge, “Autumn Evening in Serbia,” Complete Poems. Liam O’Meara, ed. (Newbridge, Ireland: Goldsmith, 1997).

  52. 52.

    Francis Ledwidge, “The Dead Kings,” Selected Poems, 70–71.

  53. 53.

    Elizabeth A. Marsland, The Nation’s Cause: French, English and German Poetry of theFirst World War (1991; rpt. London: Routledge Revivals, 2013).

  54. 54.

    Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, xix–xx.

  55. 55.

    Seamus Heaney, “Broagh,” Wintering Out (1993, rpt; London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 17.

  56. 56.

    Michael Allen, ed. “Introduction,” Seamus Heaney (London: Macmillan, 1992), 17.

  57. 57.

    Thomas Macgreevy, in Richard Aldington: An Englishman (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931).

  58. 58.

    Ploughshares, 18. “‘The Tollund Man’ seemed to me like an ancestor almost, one of my old uncles, one of those moustached archaic faces you used to meet all over the Irish countryside.”

  59. 59.

    Seamus Heaney, “The Grauballe Man,” North, 28–29.

  60. 60.

    Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, xiii.

  61. 61.

    Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, xiv.

  62. 62.

    Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2000, 24.

  63. 63.

    Bernard O’Donoghue, “Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry,” 25.

  64. 64.

    Bernard O’Donoghue, 18.

  65. 65.

    Heaney, “Introduction,” 20.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Martin Malone

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  1. University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Martin Kerby , Margaret Baguley  & Janet McDonald ,  & 

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Malone, M. (2019). “The Nest Kept Warm”: Heaney and the Irish Soldier-Poets. In: Kerby, M., Baguley, M., McDonald, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96986-2_28

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