1. Seamus Heaney a.k.a. ‘Famous Seamus’ Walk on air against your better judgement 1

2. When Settlement goes bad… 2

3. Plantation of Southern Ireland from 16 th century – leading to small landlord class in control of most of the land. Plantation of Northern Ireland from 17 th century. Numerous small English and Scottish Protestant settlers 1542 Henry VIII crowned King of Ireland 1798 Failed Rebellion (more before and more to come) 1801 Act of Union (whole island of Ireland part of United Kingdom) 3

4. early 20 th Century Ireland 6 counties in the North: Protestant majority, Catholic minority (overall ratio 2:1 but as many as 5:1 in certain areas) Remaining 26 counties: 95% Catholic, 5% protestant 21 st century – Northern Ireland 40% Catholic, 40% Protestant (and 20% other). 4

5. Timeline 1916 Easter Rising 1919-1921 War of Independence 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty: Partition of country into Ireland (Dominion within Commonwealth) and Northern Ireland (part of the UK) 1922-1923 Irish Civil War 1949 Ireland declared a Republic 5

6. Northern Ireland Nationalists/Republicans (in favour of a united Ireland, the dissolution of Northern Ireland and the Union with Britain), largely synonymous with ‘Catholic’. Unionist / loyalist (in favour of Northern Ireland being British, being part of United Kingdom). Largely synonymous with ‘Protestant’. 6

7. Opposing groups Protestant Unionist (pro the union with Britain) Loyalist (loyal to Britain) UDA (Ulster Defence Association), UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force): loyalist paramilitary groups Catholic Nationalist (pro Ireland as a nation) Republican (pro Ireland as a 32 county republic including the counties currently part of Northern Ireland). Political party: Sinn Fein IRA (Irish Republican Army), Provisional IRA (‘the provos’), Real IRA: paramilitary republican groups

8. Heaney’s literary chronology/Northern Ireland chronology 1966 Death of a Naturalist 1969 Battle of the Bogside (August 12-14). British troops sent to Northern Ireland 1971 Internment 1972 Bloody Sunday 1972 Wintering Out 1975 North 1976 Heaney moves to the Republic 1979 Field Works 8

9. Heaney’s 1983 response to inclusion in 1982 anthology of British poetry: ‘Be advised! My passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised To toast The Queen’ [Heaney, An Open Letter (Derry: Field Day, 1983)]. Explained, in 1995 lecture, his desire ‘to maintain the right to diversity within the border’. 9

10. 1984 Station Island 1987 Haw Lantern 1991 Seeing Things 1995 Nobel Prize 1998 Good Friday Agreement 2007 Power-sharing executive finalised 2010 Full devolution agreed Over 3,500 people killed in ‘the troubles’ (1969- 2001) http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?i d=1506 http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?i d=1506 10

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12. ‘[Y]ou deal with public crisis not by accepting the terms of the public’s crisis, but by making your own imagery and your own terrain take the colour of it, take the impressions of it’ [‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, 5.3, 1979 (pp. 7-22), p. 13]. 12

13. Nobel Citation ‘For works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’. ‘[D]igging becomes a metaphor of the probing of the unconscious, unspoken aspects of his nationalist psyche throughout the early works’ [Eugene O’Brien, Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2002), p. 28]. 13

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15. ‘[T]he bog was a genuine obsession. It was an illiterate pleasure that I took in the landscape. The smell of turf smoke, for example, has a terrific nostalgic effect on me. It has to do with the script that’s written into your senses from the minute you begin to breathe’ (‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, pp.17-18). 15

16. Heaney wrote of his need to ‘make a congruence between memory and bogland’ and ‘our national consciousness’. [Heaney, Preoccupations (London: Faber, 1980) p. 54- 55]. 16

17. The Tollund Man 17

18. ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ (John 8:7). 18

19. Ciarán Carson reads Heaney’s bog poetry as Heaney saying ‘suffering like this is natural: these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now’ (Carson, quoted by O’Brien, p. 30). 19

20. From ‘The Tollund Man’ Out here in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home. 20

21. From ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ ‘“Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree.” “Where’s it going to end?” “It’s getting worse.” “They’re murderers.” “Internment, understandably…” The “voice of sanity” is getting hoarse.’ 21

22. ‘Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung’. 22

23. Yet for all this art and sedentary trade I am incapable. […] half of us, as in a wooden horse Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks. Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.’ 23

24. ‘The Times are out of joint’ (verse 2) The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right! (Hamlet, 1.5, 189-190) ‘Where half of us, as in a wooden horse Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,’ ‘but now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / to saucy doubts and fears (Macbeth III.iv. 23-24). 24

25. Key Questions What is it that Heaney is resisting in his poety? What tools does he use to do so? What role might hybridity play in such resistance? How does he navigate his cultural past and current identity? 25

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