Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
“To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
Summary
In his essay on Seamus Heaney's collected Oxford lectures, The Redress of Poetry, Tim Kendall offers a brief impression of the eloquence and completeness of that collection, remarking that, in comparison to Heaney's early prose criticism, “his later prose seems more planned, more polished and more professional” (233). The intuition behind this passing observation is accurate to a degree not countenanced by such brevity. Heaney's prose—and particularly the poetics of the late 1980s to mid-1990s—is “planned” and “polished”: it is, in fact, frequently revised between first publication and subsequent collection. Some revisions are insignificant, incidental to the translation from lecture to essay; others, such as those made to Heaney's inaugural Oxford lecture, are extensive and substantial; still others, such as the suppression of a paragraph in the collected version of his Nobel speech, are as revealing as they are surprising. On closer inspection, it transpires that every collection of Heaney's prose—from Preoccupations to the selection Finders Keepers — includes some significant revisions. All of this points to the ways in which the published prose has been “polished” in a repeated, even habitual effort of self-conformation and, in some instances, self-censorship. The revisions signal how central the question of development must be to critical assessments of Heaney's prose. At their most significant, they serve to establish unequivocally the fundamental preoccupations of Heaney's poetics; indeed, they reveal the degree to which the prose itself is shaped by his trust in the transcendent possibilities of creative endeavor.
There has been some limited critical assessment of Heaney's revisions in poetic composition (McGuinness), partly stimulated by the publication of worksheets of poems collected in North (“Worksheets”; Curtis 1982, 53–62). North has received further attention in Anthony Cuda's discussion of an unpublished epigraph from Eliot's “Little Gidding.” Michael Molino has drawn attention to the marked increase in revisions and omissions of already published poems in Wintering Out, compared with Heaney's first two collections. Likewise, Patrick Crotty has acutely probed the revisions that emerge between Heaney's Selected Poems of 1980 and 1990. Most significantly, with the publication of Brandes and Durkan's Bibliography, the extensive, oeuvre-wide and habitual character of Heaney's revisions to published material—prose, as well as poems—can now be apprehended as never before.
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- Writing Modern Ireland , pp. 128 - 150Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015