The Gates Unbarred: Seamus Heaney at Harvard

It is a natural, perhaps inevitable reaction, when confronted with news of a star, to try to bask in his or her reflected light. “Noted Irish poet had long and deep ties to Harvard,” went the subtitle to an article in the Harvard Gazette, published upon the death of Seamus Heaney last week. The Boston Globe, in turn, entitled its obituary “Seamus Heaney, 74; Nobel-winning poet, taught at Harvard.”

Heaney’s relations with Harvard were, in fact, quite intimate. They stretched across 25 years and included various academic appointments, from visiting professor to poet-in-residence, a position he retained until 2006. But Harvard itself had little to do with Heaney’s development as a poet—instead it heralded and helped cultivate his status as a public intellectual.

“I put my executive self in charge,” Heaney once said of his time at Harvard to fellow Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, in a series of interviews published in 2008 as “Stepping Stones.” From poetry workshops and speeches to dinner parties at Elizabeth Bishop’s, Cambridge seemed to foster and welcome Heaney’s personality to a greater degree than his poetry.

He first arrived at Harvard in the spring of 1979 as a guest lecturer in the English department. Robert Lowell had died in 1977, and Elizabeth Bishop had just retired (according to rumors, encouraged to retire once she reached 65), leaving a gap among the faculty’s ranks. Heaney was offered a position teaching poetry workshops in the spring. It was a tempting offer that gave him the other eight months of the year to write, though it would require leaving behind his wife Marie and their three young sons—a decision with which Heaney struggled.

The night before the decision was due, the poet had a dream: He was in a desert, night approaching, when he glimpsed a lean-to next to a cliff, a place to take refuge for the night. In the next morning’s light he realized he wasn’t on a cliff at all, but had lain down next to the dark helm of a ship on the banks of the Suez Canal. It was “a counsel of boldness,” he would tell O’Driscoll, “a reminder that what looks safe and settled isn’t necessarily so.”

Heaney’s arrival, though, was eased by his acquaintance with Professor Helen Vendler, whom he had gotten to know at several events and conferences throughout the 1970s, and who took him under her wing, beginning a friendship that would last until Heaney’s death.

His first lunch was at Bartley’s, with English professor Monroe Engel, then in charge of the creative writing workshops. He settled comfortably into Cambridge life, browsing its bookstores, enjoying the ride along Storrow Drive, frequenting the restaurant One Potato, Two Potato on Mass Ave., spending afternoons in Lamont’s Woodberry Poetry Room. By 1984, Heaney had a regular gig as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, along with a room of his own in Adams House’s I-entryway.

Heaney wrote barely anything while in Cambridge. One of the few published fragments that remains is from a villanelle he wrote for Harvard’s 350th anniversary:

Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.

Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine

A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,

The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

But, as the countless obituaries of the last week have signaled, Heaney was always more than a poet—he occupied a role increasingly rare today: that of a poet whose voice was welcomed beyond his verse in the major political and cultural conversations of his day. It’s difficult to think of another writer whose translation of a thousand-year-old epic in Old English could remain on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks.

Heaney embraced this role as a public intellectual while at Harvard. Lectures and talks were common during the months he spent here, on campus and throughout the Square. He was a regular at the apartment Elizabeth Bishop shared with her longtime partner Alice Methfessel, or at Bishop’s home in Boston Harbor, or at Helen Vendler’s for dinners in Brookline.

Heaney’s poetry tended to cleave closely to the settings and themes of his native Ireland, and while he immersed himself in the intellectual life of Cambridge, American society alternately intrigued and repelled him. “America in the eighties seemed like an immense hovercraft,” he told O’Driscoll, “buoyant on its own prosperity and trust in the future.” American poets like John Ashbery proved unsatisfying to him then, seeming to match the “uncannily insulated, materially comfortable, volubly docile condition of a middle-class population on the move between its shopping malls and its missile silos.”

Even so, Heaney often remarked that he found comfort and familiarity in the rural heritage of Harvard Yard, in the fact that John Harvard’s father had been in the cattle trade in Stratford, England, that the original academic building was located next to the Newtowne (later Cambridge) livestock sheds. Heaney’s childhood on a farm in Bellaghy, Ireland seemed to pursue him, even into a modern New England university. Ireland would remain his material and intellectual home, even as Cambridge helped fashion Heaney into a literary star whose poetry and persona would stretch worldwide.