By Henry Hart
Henry Hart recalls being on the receiving end of Seamus Heaney’s unassuming and remarkable commitment to gift giving.
Seamus Heaney at a turf bog in Bellaghy, Northern Ireland, photo courtesy of the Bobbie Hanvey archives at Boston College
During my seven years of graduate and postgraduate work at Oxford, I’d gotten used to attending lectures by dons wearing black gowns and speaking with somber British accents from prepared scripts. So when Seamus Heaney sauntered into an Oxford classroom with no gown and no notes, and gave a lecture with a distinctly Irish accent, I was surprised. He laughed and chatted with the person who was about to introduce him. His thick gray hair was ungroomed, and he kept squinting as he smiled. His wife, Marie, laughed beside him.
Heaney’s lecture on that unusually warm, sunny day in 1984 focused on a poem he loved: Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.” He began by reciting the stanzas he planned to discuss. But before he got to the famous end (“Ah, no; the years, the years; / Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs”), he stumbled and asked for help from the audience. Someone offered the lines he’d forgotten. Then he finished his recitation and explained how the poem lamented the death of Hardy’s wife. I learned a good deal from the lecture, but was surprised by how informal it was.
Heaney surprised me again when I met him at Harvard the following year. I’d started research for some essays I planned to write about the influence of Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, and Geoffrey Hill on Heaney’s early poetry. I’d told Heaney I wanted to interview him. He responded on February 12: “Already, I have too many interviews in print, and I’m in the process of a Paris Review thing at the moment. Also, I think the business of talking about literary and extra-literary relations is grand, as talk, but when set down in print interferes with those relations. . . . I hope you understand my reticence on this.” Nevertheless, Heaney invited me to have dinner with him in Cambridge. He said we could talk informally about his poetry afterwards in his Adams House apartment.
As I’d soon learn, Adams House was one of Harvard’s “Gold Coast” residences built at the end of the nineteenth century to attract the sons of wealthy and powerful families. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, R. Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, and Henry Kissinger had lived there as undergraduates. It boasted a swimming pool in the basement, a common room modeled on a Florentine palace, and a dining hall constructed to look like an eighteenth-century British spa. It was named for John Quincy Adams, the sixth U.S. president and Harvard’s first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. A year before I went to Harvard, Heaney had been named the 12th Boylston Professor.
I expected Heaney to have an apartment befitting his impressive Harvard title, so I was surprised when, after returning from dinner with him on March 7, 1985, we walked into a room that resembled a monk’s cell or the stage of a Samuel Beckett play. The walls were undecorated and the floors were bare. I saw no TV, radio, or stereo. The only signs of habitation were a few pieces of institutional furniture, a cardboard box from Farrar, Straus & Giroux containing copies of his new book Station Island, and a small picture of his wife on the mantel above the fireplace.
Sitting in a chair facing Heaney, I hesitated to ask him questions about his poetry, since he’d told me he didn’t want to be interviewed. I soon realized, though, that he was willing to talk about almost anything. He answered all my questions fully and in a friendly way. At one point, however, he said he needed to take a break and left the room. Was this a signal for me to leave? Or did he just need to use the bathroom?
I heard what I thought were ice cubes clinking in glasses. Then he reappeared with a bottle of Irish whiskey and two jars. Not glasses, jars—the kind used for canning vegetables. While sipping whiskey, I asked more questions, and he gave more answers. Around 9:30, I told him I’d better leave; I was driving and didn’t want to get too tipsy. He said he’d walk me to my car, but before he did, he gave me a gift: a signed copy of Station Island.
I learned more about Heaney’s penchant for gift giving in the spring of 2002, when I hosted his three-day visit to William and Mary, the college where I’ve taught since 1986. While preparing for class on the day he was due to arrive, I got a call in my office. “This is Seamus,” the friendly voice said. “I’m in Princeton now. I was wondering what poems you’d like me to read at William and Mary.” I told him I’d been teaching a selection of his poems in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry that included “Digging,” “Death of a Naturalist,” and “Punishment.” He said, “Fine. I’ll make sure to read those for your students.” No other writer I’d invited to William and Mary had ever called me to ask what they should read on campus.
Heaney had more surprises for me after I picked him up later that day at the airport in Richmond, Virginia. As we made our way down Route 64 to Williamsburg, I asked him how the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he’d won in 1995, had affected his life. He suddenly went silent, as if my question had offended him. I glanced over at him. He was staring out the window with a deadpan look on his face. “Henry,” he said, emphasizing the first syllable of my name, “you’re not allowed to use the N-word in my presence. In my house, we have a strict rule against using the N-word.” I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. Then he chuckled and said, “You know—the Nobel.”
Heaney stayed in Williamsburg for several days before flying to Kentucky to give his next reading. I knew how busy he was—he’d agreed to a two-week reading tour in the U.S., which included charity events to raise money for Irish hospitals—so I didn’t expect to hear from him. But when my office phone rang, it was Heaney again.
“Henry,” he said in an energetic voice, “could you do me a favor?”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked.
“I left some Irish coins at my hotel. I’d like you to go get them.”
I wondered why he was so concerned about a few Irish coins; they were useless in the U.S. I was about to ask if he wanted me to mail them to his Dublin address when he said, “I’d like you to give them to your children as gifts.” I was amazed he’d bother with such a trifle during his hectic reading tour. He’d only met my two young children briefly at a party. As it turned out, I found the attractive, gold-colored coins with Celtic harps on them and gave them to my son and daughter, who were delighted to have them.
After Heaney returned to Ireland, it was my turn to receive a gift—a large envelope containing signed, special editions of his poems and lectures. I’ve organized many readings for well-known poets, scholars, and novelists over the decades, but no other visitor has ever sent me such a valuable gift.
Poets often write obsessively about a few preoccupations. Heaney alluded to this tendency in his first book of literary criticism, Preoccupations. From the beginning to the end of his career, Heaney wrote about his preoccupation with the artist’s “gift” and the inspired, trance-like state in which artists receive gifts from a muse. He was also preoccupied with the ethical obligation to “Remember the Giver,” as he said at the end of his poem “A Drink of Water,” and the obligation to share one’s gifts with others. Heaney’s devotion to gift giving and gift-exchange rituals could be exhausting at times, as his poems, essays, interviews, and letters attest. But, as I show in my new book, Seamus Heaney’s Gifts, he remained committed to producing and sharing his gifts until he died.
Henry Hart is the Mildred and J. B. Hickman Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary. He has published four poetry collections and numerous scholarly books about modern poets, including biographies of James Dickey and Robert Frost. From 1984 to 1994 he coedited VERSE, an international poetry magazine, and from 2018 to 2020 he served as poet laureate of Virginia.
Available Now
“The fact of the matter,” Seamus Heaney said in a 1997 interview with the Paris Review, “is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry.” Throughout his career, Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, maintained that poetry came to him from a mysterious source like a gift of grace. He also believed that the recipient of this sort of boon had an ethical obligation to share it with others.
Seamus Heaney’s Gifts, by the noted scholar and poet Henry Hart, offers the first comprehensive examination of Heaney’s preoccupation with gifts and gift-exchange. Drawing on extensive research in Heaney’s papers, as well as three decades of correspondence with the poet, Hart presents a richly detailed study of Heaney’s life and work that foregrounds the Irishman’s commitment to the vocation of poetry as a public art to be shared with audiences and readers around the world.
Blending careful research with evocative commentaries on the poet’s work, Seamus Heaney’s Gifts explains his ideas about the artist’s gift, the necessity of gift-exchange acts, and the moral responsibility to share one’s talents for the benefit of others.