A POET OF IRELAND AND PEACE
Author:
Date: Friday, October 6, 1995
Page: 18
Section: EDITORIAL PAGE
His is a muscular verse, filled with the richness and danger of Derry
farms and peat bogs and with the people who worked, loved, fought and were
buried there.
Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature yesterday by a
committee that cited his poems' "lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt
everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney was in Greece -- "I hope at Delphi," one friend said -- but the
announcement was cheered in Boston and Cambridge, where he has become a spring
fixture as a dynamic teacher at Harvard and generous supporter of other poets
through a busy schedule of readings and other appearances.
Like all great Irish writers, Heaney is known for the wealth of sound,
image, metaphor and rhythm in his poems. "He hears language in landscape, in
rivers, in stones," one local poet, Christopher Jane Corkery, said yesterday.
A Catholic born in Northern Ireland in 1939 but who moved to Dublin in
1972, Heaney felt the violence in his homeland passionately and wrote of it
often, but usually close up, with elegies to slain friends and descriptions of
other events and people rather than with broad pronouncements and
prescriptions.
An early poem, "Dockers," describes one in a bar with "cowling plated
forehead and sledgehead jaw" and a "fist that would drop a hammer on a
Catholic." Yet his political message was one of peace; his translation of
Philoctetes was widely taken as telling Catholics in the North to stop
contemplating their wounds and start talking of the future.
As was true also of William Butler Yeats, who won the 1923 Nobel, Heaney
has been criticized by some for not rushing more to the barricades. But
yesterday's announcement from Stockholm cited explicitly his contribution
toward resolution of the conflict -- urging both sides to speak out more. Said
a Boston friend: The Peace Prize would have been equally fitting.
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