Seamus Heaney
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Seamus "Chuckles" Heaney was born on 13 April, 1939 at Mossbawn, Co. Derry. The only son of poor black Northern Irish sharecroppers, he survived on twigs, leaves and Weetabix for the first decade of his life. This upbringing, along with the freedom he gained from it, continues to influence his poetry, instilling its savage rhythms. At the age of twelve, he killed his first hedgehog. With its roasting over a bin-full of rubbish, young Seamus knew he had at last attained manhood. As a child, he was often found to keep potatoes under his pillow and eat them raw, many philosophers thing that this is the reason for his continual writing of potatoes
His early poetry, aside from describing the landscape and political climate of Northern Ireland, charted the meteoric rise of David Hasselhoff (aka, The Hoff). An example of this is presented in his experimental sonnet titled ‘Kit at Toome Road’:
The man who drives potatoes so very long and far,
Has one companion on the lonely road,
Solitary is he but for his potato car
The prolix 'Kit', who will share Michael's load.
Like paint the leather to his thighs does cling,
With chest bared and opened to wild irish wind
Michael and Kit, they do their badass potato thing,
Like avenging angels hunt those that have sinned.
But it cannot stay long, it cannot hold
It will be traded for blond, bleach-ed locks,
Red bikinis, plastic tits, tans of gold
And the hapless swimmer near bay-side docks.
If only Mr Mulcahy would return to me,
Alas, he's a career in Germany!
At university, he joined the controversial poetry, tai chi and hill-walking group founded by Phillip Hobsbaum. Ejected from this group by a rogue hedgehog-appreciation faction, he spend the large legal settlement he was awarded for discrimination and money from early poetry prizes on the books of Louis MacNeice, Dale Carnegie and J.M. Synge. In the middle of this process he met the young and impressionable upcoming poet Paul Muldoon, who was so overawed by him that he (Muldoon) went on - somewhat cruelly - to dedicate the early poem 'Hedgehog' to him. These influences also redirected Heaney into a less rigid form of poetry (and one that explored the rhyming couplets and style of Alexander Pope), as can be seen in his later work ‘The Stations of the Car’:
Oh, how I love thee Michael Knight,
With shirt so unbuttoned and trousers so tight.
It is with this later work the Heaney began to come into his own, developing a radically diaglossic style that at once concerns itself with the basilect of the common media (the mediation of out visual input by agencies outside one’s control) and the astrolect of the dictated poetic conventions. His acclaimed collection, 'Watching Telly', likens the role of the media to empire and white society (or, as Heaney terms it, ‘The Man’), in its oppression of the minorities and its creation of social taboos and boundaries.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995, he greeted the awaiting crowd with the profound thought that they were ‘a bastarding [sic] lot of wankers’. He was later found, rocking gently back and forth behind the stage after someone presented him with a bag of hedgehog flavoured crisps. It is assumed that the unexpected stimulus had restored memories of a suppressed childhood trauma. The presenter of the crisps was summarily executed and Heaney recovered his composure.
Most recently, Seamus Heaney has written a translation of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, titled ‘Who Needs the Welsh?’. He is currently writing lyrics for a Broadway show about his childhood and adapted from his epic volume ‘Station Island’, where the infant Seamus is comforted by the flora and fauna of his childhood and he is absolved of his sins by the ghosts of Simon Sweeney, the tinker; William Carleton, the Apostate Protestant writer, Patrick Kavanagh the poet and James Joyce, who appears to him in the guise of a hedgehog.
