Seamus Heaney’s Audio Archive

Abstract

Seamus Heaney’s Audio Archive Alex Alonso (bio) In 2009 as part of a weeklong program of events in honor of Seamus Heaney’s seventieth birthday, RTÉ released a fifteen-CD box set entitled Seamus Heaney: Collected Poems. It contained the poet’s readings of all eleven of his major volumes to that point, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to District and Circle (2006). On April 13th the twelve-hour recording was broadcast in its entirety on RTÉ Radio 1, followed by a program televised live from the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and the debut of Charlie McCarthy’s feature-length documentary Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous.1 These tributes represented not only a measure of Heaney’s standing and his work’s extraordinary connection with the public but also the culmination of a long and mutually rewarding relationship with Irish broadcasting. Before the arrival of this CD box set, the complete works of Heaney’s poetry had never been collected in one place. The whole project took more than a year to record; Heaney worked closely with the RTÉ producer and sound engineers as he went poem by poem, collection by collection, reading and recording for hours at a time.2 It says much that, still recovering from a severe stroke in 2006, he committed himself to such an arduous undertaking. The performance indicates how strongly he felt about his poetry’s [End Page 227] coexistence with sound media and the spoken word, reflecting his desire to leave behind what stands as, in effect, an audio archive of his work. Heaney’s evident regard for the spoken as well as the written trace is characteristic of a poet whose verse was tuned so carefully to his own vocal pitch and whose life and career were closely intertwined with radio from the beginning as both listener and broadcaster. Orality was always foundational to his writing, and toward the end of his life the poet seems to have been intent on ensuring that his printed words would not lose touch with their original vocal imprint. In his lectures and interviews, Heaney regularly appraised his poetic influences in auditory terms. Patrick Kavanagh, he writes, “walked into my ear like an old-style farmer walking a field” (SS 192); his admiration for T. S. Eliot stems from “the physicality of his ear” and the way his “intelligence exercise[s] itself in the activity of listening” (FK 37); Heaney celebrates Robert Frost’s verse for “its posture in the mouth and in the ear, its constant drama of tone and tune”; Ted Hughes’s poetry is favored over Philip Larkin’s for possessing “a bigger transmitter” (SS 339); the beginning of the Last Gospel at Mass sounds to him “like the first note of God’s tuning fork.”3 Discussing the composition of his formative early poem “Digging,” Heaney claimed that he was “responding to an entirely phonetic prompt, a kind of sonic chain dictated by the inner ear” (SS 82–83). Clearly he, like Frost, believed that “the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”4 As he explained to Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones, receptivity to the sounds of words is “the key to getting started” (SS 449). Years before in his 1974 lecture “Feeling into Words,” Heaney traced his audial sensitivity back to a set of remembered voices that left a deep impression in childhood, “bedding the ear,” as he says, “with a kind of linguistic hardcore”: [End Page 228] Maybe it began very early when my mother used to recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings. . . . Maybe it began with the exotic listing on the wireless dial: Stuttgart, Leipzig, Oslo, Hilversum. Maybe it was stirred by the beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC weather forecast: Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre; or with the gorgeous and inane phraseology of the catechism; or with the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry of our household. . . . (P 45) The passage locates radio among the foundations of Heaney’s poetic imagination, wedged between Latin rote learning and the Catholic rites that were central to...