As Seamus Heaney entered Glenn Memorial Auditorium on Saturday, the crowd immediately erupted into a deafening applause. Packed from top to bottom, the auditorium shook with the sound; the Nobel Laureate looked a bit embarrassed.
The praise, while perhaps a bit overwhelming at first, is much deserved. Academics and critics alike have called Heaney the most important Irish poet since William Butler Yeats, with one going so far as to call him "the greatest living poet."
Kevin Young, the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and acclaimed poet who introduced Heaney to the adoring crowd, echoed such sentiments in his own speech, calling Heaney's work firmly grounded in the roots of music as language and historical placement.
Young's congratulatory, almost worshipful tone gave the impression that the reading was going to be a stern affair, filled with steel-faced seriousness and references to the classical artists.
That assumption eroded itself as soon as the man himself took the podium. "Every time I come here to Emory, the tone is a bit liturgical," he joked. The crowd ate it up.
Of course, Heaney's high standing in the poetic community is hardly a recent phenomena.Since he started writing poetry in 1957 at the age of 18 back home in Ireland, it only took Heaney 13 years to release two acclaimed books of poetry, Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, and earn a position as a lecturer at Queen's University in Belfast.
From then on, his work snowballed in popularity, and professorships at Carysford College, the University of California and Harvard University streamed in.
Still, it wasn't until he won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth" that his standing as one of the great Irish writers was confirmed, along with Yeats and Samuel Beckett.
Heaney read work from across his wide oeuvre, from his earliest collection Death of a Naturalist in 1966 to Human Chain in 2010. The selections first started in his early work, but later jumped all over the place, though it's unlikely that anyone was complaining.
Interestingly, Heaney avoided reading some of his more famous poems such as "Digging," instead opting for works that haven't been anthologized over a dozen times, such as "The Underground," "The Given Note" and the striking "Two Lorries," a sestina that compares the coal lorry (truck) that a handsome coalman used to park outside of his house in Northern Ireland to the deadly lorry that the Provisional Irish Republican Army filled with explosives and drove to the center of a bus station during "The Troubles."
Heaney was thoughtful in his approach, always explaining historical context and personal significance to the audience before delving into his work.Every poem he read seemed to have some kind of connection to Ireland as a place, from his nostalgic closer "A Kite for Aibhin" to the Orpheus and Eurydice-infused "The Underground."
Many of his works deal primarily with objects or artifacts of Europe or his childhood, following in the grand tradition of Yeats, who often wrote of Ireland's political strife and geography in poems like "Easter Uprising" and "Under Ben Bulben."
One of the most striking examples of his artifact-based poetry was a poem that explored a body found buried in a peat bog that disintegrated entirely save the head when the archeologists pulled it out of the bog. That poem, "The Tollund Man," strikes a somber tone that contrasts well with another of Heaney's object-based poems, the comical "Midnight Anvil."
Before he read it, Heaney explained that it was inspired by an action his blacksmith neighbor took on New Year's Eve, 1999; the blacksmith hit an anvil 12 times to ring in the new millennium.
Heaney joked that he meant to do something that meaningful, but he and his wife just ended up watching TV.
All in all, Heaney did an excellent job of striking a balance between meaningful reading without taking himself too seriously.
While Nobel Laureates can certainly get away with 60 minutes of minimal effort, he presented his own brilliant work with the characteristic humor and thoughtfulness that exudes through his work.
Much has been made of the comparison between Heaney and Yeats, and perhaps there may be something to it after all.
In "Ben Bulben," Yeats wrote, "Irish poets, learn your trade / Sing whatever is well-made." In his reading, Heaney made clear that he has followed that advice as far as it can possibly go.
– By Steven Wright
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