Ian Hickey is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. His first monograph, Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2021. He has also co-edited, alongside Ellen Howley, Seamus Heaney´s Mythmaking (2023), and co-edited with Eugene O´Brien The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney´s Prose and Seamus Heaney and the Art of Translation, both published by Routledge. His second monograph, Fragmentation in Twenty-First-Century Irish Poetry and Fiction, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2028.
Eugene O´Brien is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Theory and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He is editor for the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory and editor of the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series. His recent books include Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O´Carroll-Kelly (Routledge, 2023). With Eóin Flannery, he has co-edited special issues of Irish Studies Review and Études Irlandaises on contemporary Irish culture and poetics. The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Irish Writing, co-edited with Anne Fogarty, was published in 2024. With Ian Hickey, he has co-edited The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney´s Prose and Seamus Heaney and the Art of Translation. He is currently working on a co-edited volume with Eóin Flannery on Irish animal poetics and a monograph, Reading Micheal O´Siadhail: The Gift of Tongues.
The Routledge Companion to Seamus Heaney examines the full range of Seamus Heaney´s writing across all genres, as well as looking at his reception. The book looks at the micro-aspects of his writing in terms of style, symbolism and uses of language as well as at the macro-elements in terms of the social, political, linguistic and cultural contexts within which he wrote, and within which his writing was received. It examines his career development, as the Heaney of Death of a Naturalist is very different from the Heaney of Human Chain, and his translation of Aeneid Book VI. The contributors also address his letters and interviews, most notably Stepping Stones, genres which offer a form of meta-commentary on his own work from his own, less guarded perspective, and which allow for a broader reading of the concerns of the poet. This volume is not intended as a capstone to Heaney scholarship, but acts as a stepping stone towards future studies of the Nobel laureates writing.
Introduction
Ian Hickey and Eugene O´Brien
Materiality and the More-Than-Human
Chapter 1 Two Ledgers: Tollund Man and Vocation
Brendan Corcoran
Chapter 2 `Roaring off the ford´: Wintering Out, Water and the More-Than-Human
Eóin Flannery
Chapter 3 `The Smelly Majesty of Living´: The Materiality of Life as Embodied through Food in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Anke Klitzing
Other Poets / Other languages
Chapter 4 The Poetics of Collaboration: Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney
Caoimhe Higgins
Chapter 5 Seamus Heaney and W. B. Yeats
Stephen Regan
Chapter 6 `Like a human chain´: Seamus Heaney Beyond Europe and North America
Ellen Howley
Chapter 7 Heaney in China
Yuan Guangtao
Chapter 8 `A line will be held´: Seamus Heaney and Irish-Language Poetry
Josie O´Donoghue
Heaney and Place
Chapter 9 `Omphalos, Omphalos, Omphalos: The Trope of the Center in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney´
Daniel Tobin
Chapter 10 Banishing Act: Whither the Sovereignty Goddess in Seamus Heaney´s Later Verse?
Karen Marguerite Moloney
Chapter 11 Betrothed to forbidden ground: Seamus Heaney HomePlace
Angeline Kelly
Elegies, Gifts and Late Style
Chapter 12 Heaney´s Elegiac Turns
Shi Huiwen
Chapter 13 The Consolations of Form: Seamus Heaney´s Material Elegies
Bridget Vincent
Chapter 14 Seamus Heaney: Confirming Gifts
Henry Hart
Chapter 15 `From a Skylight of the World´: Seamus Heaney´s Late Style
Eugene O´Brien
Dante and the Classics
Chapter 16 Beyond the `divided mind´: Heaney, Dante and the search for unity (of the soul)
Maristella Gatto
Chapter 17 Heaney, Virgil and the Greenwood Element
Rachel Falconer
Chapter 18 Heaney and the Classics
Lorna Hardwick
Music and Imagination
Chapter 19 `The Given Note´ – Traditional Music and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Seán Crosson
Chapter 20 Seamus Heaney and the Music of Inspiration
Richard Rankin Russell
Chapter 21 The Imagination and Seamus Heaney´s Preoccupations
Ian Hickey
Religion / Catholicism
Chapter 22 Lough Derg as Operative Form in Station Island
Jenny C. W. Kwok
Chapter 23 After Catholicism: Seamus Heaney´s Quest for a New Dispensation
Andrew J. Auge
Chapter 24 Seamus Heaney and Religion as Praise
Gary Wade
Poetry, Politics and the Individual
Chapter 25 Against the Plundering of Privacy: Reading Heaney´s Letters
Magdalena Kay
Chapter 26 A Mandate to the Living: Memory and Politics in Seamus Heaney´s Squarings
Michael Parker
Chapter 27 The End: Or: Choosing My Favourite Heaney Poem
Marco Sonzogni
