Harry Clifton: The Physical World of Seamus Heaney

In the latest of the Seamus Heaney Lectures the renowned poet Harry Clifton delivered an eloquent and insightful talk that took as its central theme ‘the physical world of Seamus Heaney’.  Harry Clifton is the current Ireland Professor of Poetry, and the audience was treated to the kind of sensitive meditation that perhaps only a poet’s eye can bring to the work of another poet.  Beginning with his first school-boy encounter with Heaney’s work, the full significance of which was only to be felt later perhaps, Professor Clifton established a key dynamic for his talk – one that posed the grounded language that marked Heaney’s early work against the more rhetorically self-conscious style that until then had signified the poetic mode for his younger self.  In the working through of this creative tension Professor Clifton’s talk provided the audience with privileged access to the kind of dialogue that marks out the particular intellectual territory of modern Irish poetry.  From this starting point Professor Clifton brought us on a series of evocative journeys: from his own physical and intellectual journeys, through a provocative matrix of poetic links and influences (Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke), through to the return to physical space entailed by any journey homeward.  Linking these journeys together was a finely tuned reading of Heaney as the poet of the physical world; a reading in which Heaney’s work was seen as the attempt to bridge the gap between language and world, between text and meaning, between here and there, between heaven (and hell) and earth.  Drawing on the title of the Wallace Stevens poem ‘Not ideas about the thing But the thing itself’, Professor Clifton led his audience through a series of brilliantly selected extracts, all the while building on his focused contention that in Heaney we have not a moralist poet but rather a poet of physicality in all its forms. 

The evening was framed by a wonderful introduction by Siobhan Parkinson (the current Laureate na n’Og) who had kindly agreed to act as Chair for the lecture, and a lively session of questions from an audience clearly prompted into much thought and debate by a lecture designed to do exactly that. 

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Last Updated: Tuesday March 15 2011