Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey

Book excerpt: Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some 40 years that Seamus Heaney spent in the United States as a teacher, lecturer, friend, and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit. It is anchored by Heaney’s appointments at Berkeley and Harvard, but it also follows Heaney’s readings “on the road” at three important points in his career. It argues that Heaney was initially receptive to American poetry and culture while his career was still plastic, but as he developed more assurance and fame, he became much more critical of America as a superpower, especially in the military reaction to 9/11. This study emphasizes “the heard Heaney” as much as the “writerly Heaney” by listening in on key poetry readings at different times and to recorded but unpublished lectures on American and British poets at Harvard. It includes accounts by his creative writing students, aspiring poets, who testify to his mentoring as well as modeling for them how one can be “a poet in the world” as he was most strikingly.