When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was “Incertus,” meaning “not sure of himself.” Characteristically, this was a subtle irony. While he referred in later years to a “residual Incertus” inside himself, his early prominence was based on a sure-footed sense of his own direction, an energetic ambition, and his own formidable poetic strengths. It was also based on a respect for his readers which won their trust. “Poetry’s special status among the literary arts,” he suggested in a celebrated lecture, “derives from the audience’s readiness to . . . credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit.” Like T. S. Eliot, a constant if oblique presence in his writing life, he prized gaining access to “the auditory imagination” and what it opened up: “a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the levels of conscious thought and feeling, invigorating every word.” His readers felt they shared in this.
The external signs of Heaney’s inner certainty of direction, coupled with his charisma, style, and accessibility, could arouse resentment among grievance-burdened critics, or poets who met less success than they believed themselves to deserve. He overcame this, and other obstacles, with what has been called his “extemporaneous eloquence” and by determinedly avoiding pretentiousness: he possessed what he called, referring to Robert Lowell, “the rooted normality of the major talent.” At the same time, he looked like nobody else, and he sounded like nobody else. A Heaney poem carried its maker’s name on the blade, and often it cut straight to the bone.
