T.S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney's "North"

Abstract

In a 1977 interview discussing literary inspiration, Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney listed more than ten poets, but when T.S. Eliot was mentioned, he noted that Eliot did not particularly align with his tastes (Deanne 1977, 66). Later, the poet clarified that Eliot was not a source of inspiration for him but rather a literary superego and constant overseer from whom one must escape (Heaney, 2002, 39). This apparent contradiction persisted for decades, and the most striking manifestations of it are examined in the presentation. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Heaney’s prolonged engagement with Eliot’s tradition ultimately shaped what can be termed a “personal Eliot” within Heaney’s poetry. Accordingly, the discussion includes the most notable examples of borrowing from various Heaney collections with particular focus on the most intriguing case of borrowing from Eliot’s tradition in the 1975 collection North. This collection was published at a time when Heaney referred to Eliot as a “literary superego,” and it is no surprise that a passage from Eliot’s fourth and final quartet, Little Gidding, was used as an epigraph. In the epigraph, Eliot uses the language of paradox to discuss finding a timeless moment in history, achieved through simultaneously belonging to and distancing oneself from history. In this sense, the epigraph is not only an ideological foundation and source but also a conceptual framework for the poems in North. The paper analyzes the citation of the epigraph as an attempt both to escape from and to reiterate Eliot’s tradition. References: Heaney, S. (2022). Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Deane, S. (1977). “Unhappy and at Home: Interview with Seamus Heaney.” Crane Bag 1 (Spring).