"Unroofed Scope"? Heaney in the Nineties

Abstract

For the reception of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, the 1990s began amidst expectations of change. Many of the poet’s more attentive readers made no secret of their belief that some aspects of his writing and of the fashioning of his poetic self which had been prominent throughout the seventies and eighties had by then overstayed their critical welcome. On his part, and in a number of consecutive statements (as in a September 1990 interview), Heaney himself acknowledged a change in his outlook and his poetic ambitions which he characterized as a growing interest in ‘the poetry of clarity and plain statement’, ‘a poetry of window glass’ rather than of ‘stained glass. He further stated his belief ‘that the pleasures of the language itself and the sportiveness of inventing and just the simplicity of being whatever your volitions and impulses are - that they’re enough to be going on with’, On the same occasion, Heaney associated the change in his writing with, on the one hand, ‘a slight sense of eeriness and airiness’ derived from ‘flying on aeroplanes back and forth across the Atlantic’; and, on the other hand, the experience of ‘getting a bit older’.