Both of the Longleys and Mahon were products of Trinity College Dublin, a distinctively different culture; Heaney later recalled their superior sophistication at this stage. In other ways too, the mid-1960s set out future patterns of Heaney’s life. Fittingly, his early poems, and his first collections, repeatedly if implicitly invoked Wordsworthian “spots of time”, though Kavanagh’s influence was increasingly clear as well. A letter from Liam Miller in the Heaney archives suggests that with Faber in prospect, Heaney reclaimed the poems and constructed a slightly different selection. This is an extract from On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster, published by Princeton University Press

Source: The Irish Times September 05, 2020 05:17 UTC