Atheist in Search of the Miraculous

The same New York Review of Books that featured Garry Wills’s essay about J.F. Powers’s “nonvocation” carried a remembrance of Seamus Heaney by Fintan O’Toole, who set out the two poles of Heaney’s poetry:

He made his work from the tension between the pull of an innocent rural world and the push of violence, complexity, conflict, and contradiction, the inescapable knowledge that there is no paradise that is not already lost …

Urban readers may initially have been drawn to Heaney by some imagined promise of rustic nostalgia, but they stayed for the energy of a mind forever hovering between these two contradictions. Poetry is language held between the poles of competing desires. In Heaney’s work, the tensions extend in many directions: the Wordsworthian Romantic at odds with the Joycean realist; the atheist in search of the miraculous; the world-ranging cosmopolitan with his little patch of remembered earth; the lover of the archaic who cannot escape the urgency of contemporary history.

In the six weeks since Heaney’s death dozens of recollections of him have been published. Mine (I worked for his publisher) is here (scroll down to the bottom); Georgetown poetry professor David Gewanter, who studied with Heaney at Harvard, recalled him as “the most admired teacher no one could imitate”:

We read only one book, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, skipping between eras, styles, conversations, gifts and secrets. Heaney had it memorised, quoting or misquoting (and improving?) lines from Beowulf to Elizabeth Bishop …

Heaney grew restive with poems of droll satire, urban fatigue, ketchup-and-baloney family horrors, reflexive poems that punch at shadows. He warned us not to settle for “stuff just written in lines”. But who knew what sources we would use? “Cross your roots with your reading.”

After all this, O’Toole’s tagging of Heaney as an “atheist in search of the miraculous” caught my eye. Sure, Heaney was characterized as a Catholic poet particularly because he came from a place which drew a sharp line between Catholics and Protestants. Sure, I’d long assumed he was more a cultural Catholic than a churchgoing one. Sure, the monsignor who eulogized him in a Catholic funeral in Dublin put it plainly:

But understand me well, this not my effort to recuperate him, as the French say, to harness him in the ranks of the soldiers of Christ. How unsufferably patronising that would be! I think rather of something more deep-seated than such easy conformism.

Devlin characterized Heaney as an Irish Catholic by inheritance:

Like many of our generation we had both inherited, he on the plains of South Derry, I in the hills of Tyrone, the imagination and with it the memory of a community. What was important was not so much the prayers we did or did not say as the prayers that had been said before us for generations, generations whose hard won loyalties were so authentically embodied in the man and so vibrantly expressed in his work.

That sounds right. And yet, six weeks later, I am still taken by surprise by Heaney’s friend O’Toole’s sketch of him as an atheist – this poet whose work carries the “live energy” of Hopkins, and who in his Nobel lecture likened himself to St. Kevin, “overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great and small.”“

I am eager to know more. What, and how, did Seamus Heaney believe? Send insights to [email protected]; I’ll round them up before long. Meanwhile, I’ll be reading – rereading – Heaney’s poetry.

• 9 October 2013