To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney, RTÉ presents a series of essential recordings from the archives.
RTÉ Radio's Rattlebag hosted and broadcast a conversation between Seamus Heaney and presenter Myles Dungan to salute his 65th birthday in 2004. The event took place in a packed Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire.
Heaney mentions his early influences such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and how he came alive to poetry before reorientating himself to Irish writers. Listening to what Heaney describes in the interview, the mesmeric voice of TS Eliot calmed him into thinking that he himself might have something. He refers to his poem Digging as his first time he felt his own voice coming on. He refers to Robert Frost as another influence and how 'you make up the way you sound on the page’. Heaney turns to what John McGahern said to add to the idea of finding your voice and knowing you have something: ' You can have the cage – but unless you have a bird in there it’s no good’.
About his different poetry collections, Heaney talks about how the title Door into the Dark came to him, about becoming a public voice and how all along he was finding ways or trying to address what was happening in his country. He says his work Sweeney Astray came about as a job he invented for himself when he went freelance for the first time, so that by the end of his first year, he would have something to measure himself by. The 'high example', as he put it, was poet Thomas Kinsella’s recent publication of The Táin, was a big influence on Heaney taking on such a project, delving into an ancient Irish text and story. The material allowed him to write about trees and water.
Other poets he mentions in the conversation include Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, John Montague, Elizabeth Bishop and Thomas Kinsella, and richness of talking about poetry and matters of the world with them.
He also offers his views on creative writing courses, the importance of learning poetry at school, and of accidently declining an invitation by renowned thinker RD Laing when the philosopher (who Heaney didn’t recognise) suggested they have dinner following a public reading of Heaney’s he had just attended.
