Collecting Heaney’s Poems, Familiar and Unfamiliar

Abstract

Collecting Heaney’s Poems, Familiar and Unfamiliar Bernard O’Donoghue (bio) and Rosie Lavan (bio) Seamus heaney’s death on 30 August 2013 ended a career in poetry that spanned more than half a century. As this special issue of Éire-Ireland indicates, readers continue to encounter the vibrant afterlives of Heaney’s career. His reputation and legacy rest primarily on the twelve volumes of poetry he published with Faber and Faber. Since his death, Faber has been nourishing Heaney’s readers with releases such as 100 Poems (2018) and reissues of his landmark collections, including the 2016 edition of Death of a Naturalist and the 2017 edition of Field Work. Central to these efforts over the past decade has been the commissioning of four major new volumes: Heaney’s translations, letters, and poems as well as the first full-length biography by Fintan O’Toole. Marco Sonzogni’s Translations of Seamus Heaney appeared in 2022,1 and Christopher Reid’s Letters of Seamus Heaney was published in 2023. As editors of the forthcoming The Poems of Seamus Heaney, our task is to compile a comprehensive edition—in other words to gather all the poems Heaney published in the original twelve volumes and in any known print publications to which he contributed since the late 1950s. This article explains the editorial principles governing our selection and arrangement of the poems published under Heaney’s authority as well as those published posthumously—now offered between the covers of one inclusive book. We highlight examples of works we find especially compelling that illustrate the diversity of [End Page 77] Heaney’s uncollected poems and the significance of placing them in sequence alongside those he chose to collect in the twelve volumes. We also consider how Heaney’s national and international profiles governed the reception and afterlives of certain key poems and how his decisions to revise (or not to revise) can be traced through the textual histories of his work. In this respect, our editorial task has been immeasurably enriched by the archival resources that Heaney made available for readers, particularly the extensive collection of papers he delivered himself to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in 2011. That archive, along with the significant collection held at Emory University and holdings in libraries and special collections in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, are indispensable resources for constructing the narrative of Heaney’s life in print. Since the availability of these remarkable collections to researchers provides glimpses of the range of Heaney’s unpublished poetry, our forthcoming edition will include a number of previously unpublished poems. Such newly available works present unique questions for us as editors, but they are—we trust—unquestionable gifts to his readers. Principles of Inclusion At a memorial event for Seamus Heaney at Cambridge University in 2014, Roy Foster asserted that Heaney, like W. B. Yeats, wrote “books” rather than “collections” of poems.2 Whether we think of Heaney’s volumes as “books” or “collections,” each of his twelve original volumes from Death of a Naturalist to Human Chain has a clear and sustained coherence. Therefore we have chosen to retain these twelve volumes of poetry published between 1966 and 2010 by Faber and Faber as our core inclusions, forming the spine of the forthcoming volume.3 Additionally, uncollected poems published by the poet or with his authority from all periods of his career play a [End Page 78] major role in the new volume. Since it will include such published work chronologically interspersed between the twelve core books, readers will be able to locate all the poems that Heaney published in the Poems of Seamus Heaney. In the case of those poems appearing in various publications since the poet’s death in 2013, we have relied on their editors for textual authority. Finally, a number of unpublished poems from the archives will also be published for the first time in this volume. The key role played by the many “Selected” editions of Heaney’s poetry in shaping the reception of his poetic oeuvre suggests the restorative dimension of our forthcoming edition. Selected volumes of Heaney’s poems were published relatively early in his...