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ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney is viewed as a pre-eminent poet of nature, and is often read through the lens of ecopoetic and ecocritical theories. Yet no earlier scholarship has mentioned his support for conservation. Through research on archives, limited editions and conservation documents, this article shows that Heaney supported high-profile environmental organisations and campaigns, including the Irish Peatland Conservation Council, World Wildlife Fund, the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation, the RSPB, and a campaign against a new road that threatened a bogland. This article challenges readings of Heaney that proposed that he merely explored a ‘connection’ to nature, and shows that he used writing to protect environments he cared about. Heaney’s modest environmental activities are not without complications. Yet when Heaney uses an early bog-poem to support a later conservation project, or when a campaign aims to save the ecology of ‘Heaney Country’, culture clearly plays a role in environmental engagement.
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Heaney judged the Arvon Foundation’s poetry competition with Ted Hughes in 1980. See Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, editors. 1980. Arvon Foundation Poetry Competition 1980 Anthology. Ulster Museum. A Personal Selection: Seamus Heaney. August 20-October 24 1982. Ulster Museum Publication Number 248. Seamus Heaney, author, and Tim O’Neill, designer. 2004. ‘Columcille the Scribe’ limited edition poem. Royal Irish Academy library. Seamus Heaney, poet, and John O’Connor, engraver. N.d. ‘The Earth House’. National Library of Ireland Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition, 2021. Limited edition marked LO P 592. Heaney opened the ‘Face to Face with Your Past’ exhibition at Silkeborg Museum, Denmark, where he’d seen the Tollund Man bog body, 2nd Aug 1996. ‘The Man and the Bog’, corrected proof, Silkeborg Museum. Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers, collection 960, box 86, folder 19. Seamus Heaney. 1985. ‘From the Republic of Conscience’. Dublin: Amnesty International Irish Section. Seamus Heaney. ‘The Wishing Chair’ 1990. (Later collected as ‘Squarings xxxix’ in Seeing Things). John F. Deane, ed. Thistledown: Poems for UNICEF. Dedalus. Brandes and Durkan 218.
2. Heaney writes on a draft of his poem ‘Belderg’ that he donated a page of the manuscript to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council to raise funds via sale at an auction in 1989. National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney manuscripts. MS 49,493/39 Fol 1 Manuscript draft of ‘Bogland’ beginning ‘26 July 1974 (1) Contributed to Auction, May 1989’ Manuscript on cream A4 paper, p. 135 (digital catalogue numbering). See also my analysis below. The 1989 anthology The Orange Dove of Fiji: Poems for The World Wide Fund for Nature contained Heaney’s poem ‘The Road at Frosses’. This was later collected as ‘Squarings’ xxxi’ in Seeing Things (Brandes and Durkan 215). 1991 saw Heaney contributing to a series of posters for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation, which paired artwork by T. P. Flanagan with sections of his poems. For example, T. P. Flanagan’s ‘Where Sheep Have Passed’ is paired with two stanzas of Heaney’s ‘Bogland’ for the ‘Peatlands’ poster. National Library of Ireland EPH F1089. Sections of Heaney’s poem ‘The Peninsula’, from Door into the Dark (1969), features on the ‘Wetlands’ poster, an excerpt from ‘Exposure’ (1975) on ‘Woodlands’, and an extract from ‘Fieldwork’ on ‘Meadowlands’. I am thankful to Siobhan Coyle from Ulster Wildlife for images of the posters. In 1999, Heaney’s poem ‘The Child That’s Due’ from ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ was printed in a limited edition broadside by the Bank of Ireland Group Treasury, with some signed copies for Irish Peatlands Conservation. The Bank of Ireland Group made a donation to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council’s ‘Save the Bog’ campaign in recognition of Heaney’s contribution (Brandes and Durkan 158). The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Northern Ireland branch notes that ‘Lough Beg near Toome is part of a landscape that Seamus Heaney called “the country of the mind”. The much-loved poet wrote about his experiences growing up in the area in poems like “The Strand at Lough Beg” and lent his support to a management plan from the RSPB to improve the site’. Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. 2010. I am thankful to Catherine Heaney and the Estate of Seamus Heaney for bringing this to my attention.
3. Email from Catherine Heaney at the Seamus Heaney Estate to Yvonne Reddick. February 16, 2022.
4. C. B. Cox, ‘The Painter’s Eye’, Spectator, 20 May 1966, 638. According to Blake Morrison, Heaney belonged to ‘post-1945 nature poetry – an imprecisely defined genre, but one presided over by Ted Hughes’ (1982, 17). Blake Morrison (1982). Seamus Heaney. London: Methuen.
5. Specifically, ‘Belderg’ for the Irish Peatland Conservation Council in 1989, and ‘Exposure’ for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation (1991) – a selective quotation that cuts the Wicklow setting from the latter poem. The term ‘Ulster’ was controversial: Seamus Heaney, interviewee, and Mark Carruthers, interviewer. 2011. ‘Seamus Heaney: ‘If I described myself as an Ulsterman I’d have thought I was selling a bit of my birthright’. Irish Times, January 23rd 2011. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/seamus-heaney-if-i-described-myself-as-an-ulsterman-i-d-have-thought-i-was-selling-a-bit-of-my-birthright-1.2077002
6. ‘The Road at Frosses’ was published in a World Wide Fund for Nature anthology whose contributors included British royalty (1989); ‘The Child that’s Due’ from ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ supported the aforementioned ‘Save the Bog’ campaign in 1990, as the Bank of Ireland Group treasury made a donation to the campaign in recognition of Heaney’s permission to print the poem. Brandes and Durkan 158, 215.
7. It is important to note that Auden’s ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’ goes on to say that a poem is ‘a way of happening, a mouth’. Auden’s and Heaney’s stances on the role of poetry are elaborated in an article by editor Neil Astley about his anthology Earth Shattering: Ecopoems (2007). Neil Astley. 2008. ‘Something in nothing’. Guardian, February 28, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/26/poetry
8. For work on the impacts of Silent Spring on ecocritical studies, see for example Richard Kerridge, 2012. ‘Ecocriticism and the Mission of “English”’. In Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies. Edited by Greg Garrard. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 11–24. For information on how the scientific community views Silent Spring, see Nature, Ecology and Evolution. 2022. ‘Editorial: Silent Spring at Sixty’. Nature, Ecology and Evolution 6 (26 Sept 2022): 1399–1400. For the impact of Silent Spring on Hughes and Plath, see Reddick (2017), p. 118. Heaney’s poem ‘On the Spot’ was written in response to a commission by poets John Burnside and Maurice O’Riordan for a volume marking the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring: Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. 2004. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
9. First published in The Listener in 1969 (Brandes and Durkan, 299) and collected in Wintering Out Heaney (1972), London: Faber & Faber, 50.
10. National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney archive, MS 49 493–12 fol 1, labelled pp. 1–54 by archivist, manuscript and annotated typescript drafts of poems, many of which were collected in Wintering Out. TS with MS amendments, cream A4 paper, p. 46 (digital catalogue numbering), ‘A Pollution’. Typescript with handwritten amendments.
11. For further discussion of past environments, the carbon cycle, and ‘deep time’ in Heaney’s bog-poems, see David Farrier. 2019. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 34–47. See also Yvonne Reddick. Forthcoming. Anthropocene Poetry, Place, Environment and Planet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
12. Threats to boglands occur in an unlikely place, early in Heaney’s career: his 1972 review of a 1933 novel by an Anglo-Irish lord that features the Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate as an antagonist, and that ends with a tidal wave of bog. Heaney reviewed a 1972 reprint of Lord Dunsany’s novel The Curse of the Wise Woman. The Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate threatens a bog in the novel (1980, 205).
13. Seamus Heaney, interviewee, and Mark Carruthers, interviewer. 2011. ‘Seamus Heaney: “If I described myself as an Ulsterman I’d have thought I was selling a bit of my birthright”’. Irish Times, January 23rd 2011. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/seamus-heaney-if-i-described-myself-as-an-ulsterman-i-d-have-thought-i-was-selling-a-bit-of-my-birthright-1.2077002
14. The National Library of Ireland’s catalogue entry for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation ‘Peatlands’ poster reads: ‘Poster featuring two verses of Heaney’s poem ‘Bogland for T.P. Flanagan’ (1969) printed on sheet beneath an reproduction of a painting ‘Where Sheep Have Passed’ by the artist Terence Philip Flanagan, RHA, PRUA. This poster is autographed in pencil by T.P. Flanagan on sheet. At bottom of sheet, printed underneath poem: ‘The printing of this poster was generously assisted by the Bass Ireland Limited Community Awards Scheme. A short paragraph concerning peatlands relating to the work done by the Ulster Trust For Nature Conservation is printed at lower right of sheet’.
15. Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 4. See for example ‘The Moving Bog’, Bord na Mòna, undated booklet, T. A. Barry’s ‘Origins and Distribution of Peat-Types in the Bogs of Ireland’, undated article funded by Bord na Mòna energy company, and Leslie Gardner, ‘Bogland Harvest’, Blackwoods, 1974.
16. Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 4. ‘The Moving Bog’, Bord na Mòna, undated booklet.
17. National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney manuscripts. MS 49,493/39 Fol 1 Manuscript draft of ‘Belderg’ beginning ‘26 July 1974 Contributed to Auction, May 1989’. Manuscript on cream A4 paper. The grainy quality of some of the lettering suggests that this is a photocopy of the manuscript that Heaney contributed to the auction.
18. National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney manuscripts. MS 49,493/39 Fol 1 Manuscript draft of ‘Bogland’ beginning ‘26 July 1974 (1) Contributed to Auction, May 1989’. Manuscript on cream A4 paper, p. 135 (digital catalogue numbering).
19. Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney Papers collection 960, box 89, folder 19, two word processed or faxed letters from Mogens Schou Jørgensen headed ‘Wetlands Archaeology Research Project’, regarding Heaney’s essay. See also https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/past/past25.html#Bog, which details the discussion of wetland environments and archaeology at the 1998 conference.
20. Email from Seamus Burns to Yvonne Reddick, February 16, 2022.
21. See for example Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry winner Pascale Petit’s ‘For a Coming Extinction’. 2020. Extinction Rebellion: Writers Rebel. July 23 2020. https://writersrebel.com/tag/pascale-petit/
22. Change.org. N.d. ‘Stope [sic] Ecocide in Heaney Country’. https://www.change.org/p/save-heaney-country-ecocideinheaneycountry.
23. The document’s title cites the ‘everyday miracles and the distant past’ that the Nobel Committee found in Heaney’s work when they awarded him the Prize in 1995.
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Yvonne Reddick
Yvonne Reddick is a poet and ecocritic. She has been the recipient of an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2021) and seven other literary awards. She is the author of Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Palgrave, 2017) and Burning Season (Bloodaxe, 2023).