Seamus Heaney and Catholicism

The book makes extensive use of unpublished material to offer fresh insights into Heaney's complex engagement with Catholicism.

Gary Wade (Author)

9781009541343, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 February 2025

248 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.1 cm, 0.52 kg

Seamus Heaney and Catholicism makes extensive use of unpublished material to offer fresh insights into Heaney's complex engagement with Catholicism. Gary Wade explores how Catholicism operates in ways other than social and political, which have largely been the focus of critics up until now. Using extensive unpublished material, including early drafts of some familiar poems, it offers close readings which explore how Catholicism operates at the level of feeling, and how it continued to have an emotional purchase on Heaney long after he had left behind orthodox practice. It also engages with Heaney's increasing concern, in his later work, with the loss of a metaphysical sensibility, and his turning to the Roman poet Virgil to deal with questions of death and post-mortem existence. The book concludes by arguing that Heaney's Catholicism is displaced rather than rejected, and that his vision expands to accommodate both the Christian and the Classical worlds.

Introduction: Seamus Heaney and Catholicism
1. Innerspaces of an early life: family, school and parish
2. Renewing the ordinary: death of a naturalist, door into the dark, wintering out
3. 'Pining for ceremony': north, field work, the haw lantern
4. 'Habit's afterlife': Station Island
5. 'Things beyond measure': seeing things, the spirit level, electric light
6. 'Well-water far down': district and circle, human chain
Afterword: 'love with weeping'
Works cited.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]