1964


Towards the end of this year, we find Seamus Heaney – hereafter, ‘SH’ – in possession of what he thought might be enough poems to make up his first published collection. He had already received a good number of acceptances from literary magazines and newspapers both north and south of the Irish border and his name was getting known. Recommending magazines in the Republic where his friend and fellow Northerner Seamus Deane might send his own poems, he shows his experience in the field. At this moment, he was waiting to hear if the poems he had submitted, under the title Advancements of Learning, to Dolmen Press in Dublin would be accepted for publication.

To Seamus Deane

MS Emory

9 December 1964

St Joseph’s Training College, Belfast 11

Dear Seamus,

Christmas had better be a time of good will if you are not to stop reading just about here. My neglect of your last letter and your first son amounts to an insult; my accumulating guilt feelings grow into a neurosis. Perhaps it is not too late to make amends.

I was delighted when I heard about Conor (?) Fitzgerald – my corresponding pen was impotent but I wrote a short secret poem (which I feared later was sentimental, so did not send it to you – maybe I will sometime). Marion and you have certainly taken life by the scruff of the neck and I trust it is as rewarding as I imagine it must be. All three of you have my accumulated good wishes – and envy.

And congratulations again on your fellowship. I was speaking to Butter about a week ago – as usual he was vague but conveyed the necessary information – that you were doing well and had obtained a Peterhouse? (no?) research fellowship. I am delighted and confident that is merely the first rung of [a] new ladder of honours.

Now to minor matters. I got engaged a fortnight ago to Marie Devlin and hope to be married next August. We are very happy and believe that we can remain so for a lifetime. I don’t imagine you knew Marie – she was at St Mary’s TC and has been teaching in Co. Down this last three years. I met her two years ago and knew from the beginning that she was the girl to hunt – but now she is not so much a quarry, more a way of life.

I have wasted the whole time since leaving Queen’s (apart from finding Marie). I have not written a chapter of a thesis – I am not yet engaged upon one. With the help of God and the engagement I’ll get stuck into something from the New Year onwards. I’d like to do something on ‘The Repressed Hero in Modern Irish Writing’ but nobody in Queen’s is interested.

I will not consider the three years a complete fiasco if one venture which I have in hand at the moment succeeds. I have thirty poems with the Dolmen Press in Dublin. They say they like them but have come to no final decision about publication so far. If they happened to take them – which is extremely doubtful – I should slam into an MA on Irish literature and in two years’ time try for a spell in some American university as lecturer in this field. Then I should like to come back to the Training College or an Irish university. However, there are too many ‘ifs’ involved here and more than likely I shall drift lazily and discontentedly towards unqualified senility in the lackadaisical philistine womb of St Joseph’s. Enough said about St Joseph’s. Last year I worked, this year it has affected me so successfully that I too am happy to freelance fuzzily in half my lectures. Which is not good enough.

Are you doing any writing yourself now? I think you asked me for some addresses in the last letter so that was hopeful. The best places in this country at the moment are:

Poetry Ireland

23 Upper Mount Street,

Dublin 2.

This comes out twice yearly and is devoted almost entirely to new poetry.

The Dubliner,

Haccombe Parva,

Killiney,

Co. Dublin.

A quarterly containing short stories, critical articles on literature, painting and theatre, and a good proportion of poetry.

The Kilkenny Magazine,

c/o Kilkenny Literary Society,

35 High Street,

Kilkenny.

Same as the Dubliner.

Besides these, the only other place where you could wish to appear is the Irish Times, Westmoreland Street, Dublin. It prints poems nearly every Saturday and pays more than any of the others.

If you are coming home at Christmas, be sure and let me know. We have a phone in Bellaghy – 257 – and I have a Volkswagen for which I am still £300 in debt but which will get me around for another year or two. So if I can do any runs for you or call to see you, write or ring.

Until then, regards to Marion and the baby, apologies and congratulations again and good luck.

With every best wish,

Seamus Heaney

PS I trust the address is correct.

SH had been appointed Lecturer in English at St Joseph’s after a short spell as a schoolteacher.

Seamus Deane (1940–2021) was one of SH’s oldest friends, having attended St Columb’s College at the same time, he as a day boy, SH as a boarder. Deane had then gone on to take both a BA and an MA in English at Queen’s University Belfast, before a research fellowship enabled him to study for a PhD at Pembroke College (not Peterhouse), Cambridge. Like SH, he was also writing poems. Conor Fitzgerald was indeed the name of Deane’s first child, born in May.

The English scholar Peter Butter (1921–99) taught at Queen’s.

Marie Devlin (b.1940) was second of the six daughters born to Tommy (1906–90) and Eileen (1908–85) Devlin, who farmed in Ardboe in Co. Tyrone. She and SH had met at a dinner at Queen’s two years previously.

Dolmen Press had been founded by Liam and Josephine Miller in 1951, specifically to publish the work of Irish poets. In the brief letter that Liam Miller (1924–87) sent SH on 5 February 1965, he wrote: ‘I return your manuscript herewith and will be very glad to hear from you at a later date. If you are in Dublin some time perhaps you would like to telephone me and we might meet.’ By then, however, SH had already been invited to submit poems to the London publishers Faber and Faber.


1965


Professionally, the two most significant events this year for SH were the unsought invitation that came from London publishers Faber and Faber to submit a collection of poems for consideration, and the agreement to publish that swiftly followed. In his personal life, the most significant was his marriage to Marie Devlin.

To Charles Monteith

TS Faber

2 February 1965

St Joseph’s Training College, Belfast 11

Dear Mr Monteith,

Thank you for your most encouraging letter of 15th January. It gave me new confidence to find that people who were neither friends nor rivals took an interest in my work and I look forward to submitting a collection for your consideration.

I have no objections to your making photostat copies of the poems.

I remain,

Yours sincerely,

Seamus Heaney

Charles Monteith (1921–95), born and brought up in Co. Antrim, had been Director at Faber since 1954. One of his achievements as editor of the poetry list had been to overcome his initial caution and, heeding T. S. Eliot’s encouragement, to publish Ted Hughes’s (1930–98) The Hawk in the Rain (1957). Monteith wrote to SH after seeing ‘Digging’, ‘Storm on the Island’ and ‘Scaffolding’ in the 4 December 1964 New Statesman, of which Karl Miller (1931–2014) was Literary Editor. The poet Edward Lucie-Smith (b.1933) subsequently showed Monteith more of SH’s work.

To Seamus Deane

MS Emory

[undated]

St Joseph’s Training College, Belfast 11

Dear Seamus,

I had begun twice and your card was what I deserved. Apologies once again for everything, including the notepaper. I am supervising an examination here at the moment.

I return the poems – reluctantly in the case of ‘Lost and Won’, ‘Heat-Tossed Night’ and ‘Abandoned Treasure’. I agree that ‘Lost and Won’ is a big attempt and think that you have succeeded in the most difficult area – sustaining a large open rhythm without formulating it into any monotonous pattern of beats. The orchestration of the images is magnificent, the sense of quest as pervasive and urgent as in ‘Childe Harold’. I see what you mean when you said [it] is a bow-wow without a bite – but the genre in which you are working is rhetorical rather than witty and the orotund quality I think comes off. There are some places where a word fills out a cadence impressively but I feel is a large gesture rather than an explosion of insight – e.g. ‘contagiously’ at line four (it could be argued about), ‘persuasively coaxing and cajoling’, ‘noiselessly hummed’ – but this is putting a first draft through the mill rather severely.

The love-poems are probably the most achieved. You have a rich vein of metaphor that is disciplined by an almost Donnish sense of form. But again, I think it is in [the] throbbing quality of the rhythm that you are most individual.

On paper lined and with a ruled margin – very likely St Joseph’s College issue – this interrupted letter was not sent for another six months: see letter to Deane of [4th?] August, below.

To Charles Monteith

MS Faber

18 May 1965

St Joseph’s Training College, Belfast 11

Dear Mr Monteith,

I enclose a selection of poems for your consideration. You have already seen a few of these in the batch which you obtained in December. I hope this group is a bit stronger.

I remain,

Yours sincerely,

Seamus Heaney

This selection of poems, which now bore the title Death of a Naturalist, was arranged differently from the typescript submitted to Dolmen and contained new work. It was read and commented on not only by Monteith but also by a junior editor at Faber, Mary-Kay Wilmers (b.1938). Of SH’s revised submission, she reports that ‘a large batch of childish folklore has been weeded out and replaced by a number of new poems which, though they have their weaknesses, show far more assurance and co-ordination between description and comment’; and she concludes, ‘I think we should take Mr Heaney on.’ In 1992, Wilmers would be appointed Editor of the London Review of Books.


Copyright © 2023 by The Estate of Seamus Heaney

Copyright © 2023 by Christopher Reid