Lit Hub Excerpts R. F. Foster's On Seamus Heaney

An excerpt from R. F. Foster's On Seamus Heaney (Princeton University Press, 2020) at Lit Hub considers the Irish poet's rendering of his own background: "There is a Proustian exactness in his evocation of the texture and detail of his early life, the unerring memory for the illustration on a tin of condiments or the name of an obscure piece of machinery, and he retained a novelist’s perception of circumstance and psychology." More:

He could also mock this aspect of his reputation: on a visit to the “Tam O’Shanter Experience” at Robert Burns’s birthplace, he was teased that there would one day be a “Seamus Heaney Experience” and replied, “That’s right. It’ll be a few churns and a confessional box.” Heaney was marked out early by his cleverness (in a family with its fair share of schoolteachers as well as farmers, and giving the traditional Irish priority to a good education). He progressed from the local primary schools, via success in the eleven-plus examination, to life as a boarder in St. Columb’s College, Derry. The wrench of leaving home and family at twelve years old in 1951 remained a sharp memory; the poems and autobiographical reminiscences which record it suggest the special position which he held in his family.

“I began as a poet,” Heaney later remarked, “when my roots were crossed with my reading.” At St. Columb’s, his classmates included the future politician John Hume and the brilliant Seamus Deane, himself an apprentice poet but better known later as a powerful and excoriating literary critic. From early on, they would try out their poetic efforts on each other. The College’s conventional but thorough education gave a good grounding in Latin, which served Heaney well in later life, but also exposure to the English poetic tradition…

Read on at Lit Hub.