Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey

Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some forty years that Seamus Heaney spent in the U.S. as teacher, as lecturer, as friend and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit. It is anchored by Heaney’s appointments at Berkeley and Harvard, but it also follows Heaney’s readings on the road at three important points in his career. It argues that Heaney was initially receptive to American poetry and culture while his career was still plastic, but as he developed more assurance and fame, he became much more critical of America as a superpower, especially in the military reaction to 9/11. This study emphasizes the heard Heaney as much as the writerly Heaney by listening in on key poetry readings at different times and to recorded but unpublished lectures on American and British poets at Harvard. It includes accounts by his creative writing students, aspiring poets, who testify to his mentoring as well modeling for them how one can be a poet in the world as he was most strikingly.