Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

Editor’s Introduction Vera Kreilkamp Many in the english-speaking world remember that late summer day more than a decade ago when news of Seamus Heaney’s death reached us. A front-page article in the New York Times the next morning reported the loss of a poet whose mastery of language accompanied a remarkable sense of responsibility to his growing and sometimes grueling public role. Seamus Heaney: Afterlives focuses on the decade following Heaney’s death on 30 August 2013. The passage of time since has amplified his aesthetic and moral reach—offering new contexts and complexities to his achievement. Time has also made clear his enduring presence on an island he witnessed, sometimes with skepticism, transforming itself from the seemingly timeless rural community of his birthplace in the North to the globalized modern capital of Dublin in 2013. This special issue of Éire-Ireland contributes to the growing body of literary studies of Heaney’s writing but explicitly focuses on the afterlife period. Scholars explore recently available archival sources and forgotten publications and examine new institutional commemorations of his life. They also attend to the auditory and visual echoes of the presence Heaney left in recordings, radio broadcasts, and photographs as part of his legacy. In the issue’s nine interviews with poets publishing their first volumes after his death, the voices of younger Irish writers reflect on Heaney as a precursor—inspiring [End Page 5] them to discover their own subjects and styles as they respond to his accomplishments. As Annemarie Ní Churreáin writes, I’ll stumble across a phrase that excites my imagination or a word I want to sculpt into a title, only to be reminded, yet again, that he was here first. He rendered the thing so artfully that one has to be braced, doubly so, for the uphill push of making a thing shine newly. But that bracing, like many other types of restraint, can be exceptionally useful. For Nithy Kasa, We almost have to explain to ourselves that Heaney does not own these words: the “boglands” and the “prairies.” But this, in turn, only proves his mastery and his imprint on Irish literature. He’s very alive here in print and in conversations . . . already taking his place in our generation as the face of Irish poetry. Stephen Sexton observes that following Heaney as a poet offers a new freedom—and obligation: The poems are there, and now we have to find new ways to write about things. Heaney’s influence is tactfulness, responsibility. If you feel as if you have got something to say, do it as well and as compassionately as you can. In his Nobel Lecture “Crediting Poetry,” delivered in Stockholm in 1995, Heaney spoke about moving from the pre-reflective security of his childhood at Mossbawn, Co Derry, into the wideness of the world: into “the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival—whether in one’s poetry or one’s life—turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.” This issue of Éire-Ireland suggests how the range and ever-widening aesthetic and social vision of Seamus Heaney’s art will continue to unfold as readers explore the afterlife decade—and the decades to come. [End Page 6] Footnotes * As editor of this special issue Seamus Heaney: Afterlives I thank our contributors for their splendid essays: Rand Brandes, Heather Clark, Guy Beiner, Bernard O’Donoghue and Rosie Lavan, Geraldine Higgins, Maureen Kennelly, Alex Alonso, and Bobbie Hanvey. I am grateful to Kelly Sullivan for interviewing nine Irish poets, to Marjorie Howes, Joe Nugent, and Catherine Heaney for ongoing advice, to my patient coeditor Nick Wolf for organizing final production, to layout editor Judy Gilats for dealing with endless requests to review figures, and to Tess Koetting for her always vigilant eye. Copyright © 2023 Irish American Cultural Institute