What the Laureate Left Out

Heather Treseler accepts the challenge of “The Poems of Seamus Heaney,” a new “definitive collection” of the Irish poet’s work.

By Heather TreselerDecember 2, 2025

• Poetry

“DEAR JEEM,” the poet Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend, the poet and novelist Seamus Deane, in 1966, as both writers’ careers were finding their runway, “Here are the proofs [of your poems …] have you anything else to bung in here?” That summer, Heaney was editing a chapbook of Deane’s poems for the Belfast Festival. The two writers had met in grammar school at ages 11 and 10, respectively, and remained close friends throughout their lives—Heaney going on to become a globally acclaimed poet, translator, and Nobel laureate, while Deane’s career as a scholar, critic, and editor helped to spearhead Irish studies as a disciplinary field.

Yet on the heels of his warm address to “Jeem” (in other letters, Heaney calls his friend “Deansie” and “a stóirín,” or “my little treasure”), Heaney critiques the poems of Deane’s that had appeared in a recent edition of the prestigious British journal Encounter. “[T]he very luxuriance of the sounds is distracting,” he notes, “and possibly a bit too much: agglutinate, exfoliate, organically eviscerate all in three lines is too much for me.” It’s the kind of editorial tough love one only gives a trusted friend, and Heaney’s aims were high, Horatian even, in wanting to knock their foreheads against the stars. Or, as he wrote conspiratorially to Deane in another letter, “let’s do an Irish takeover on English poetry.”

I cite Heaney’s early correspondence because it reveals how rigorous his editorial standards became in the years leading up to his first major collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), which ignited global notice, garnering praise from such critics as Christopher Ricks, who acknowledged the young poet’s “power and precision.” Over the next four decades, Heaney’s editorial strictness never flagged: he shaped each of his dozen collections through the publication of Human Chain (2010), three years before his death, making clear distinctions between what he deemed a “bookpoem” and poems that did not attain that high mark.

Indeed, despite his “early” receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1995, Heaney did not succumb to easy egotism, blurry judgment, or other perversions of fame. He seems to have obeyed the imperative in his 1975 poem “North” to “keep your eye clear / as the bleb of the icicle”—despite the literal storms that celebrity sent his way: at one point, the Heaneys had to change their home number to keep the phone from ringing at all hours of night and day. According to Christopher Reid, editor of Heaney’s Letters (2023), the poet’s wife, Marie, reportedly noted, “There’s no such thing as a free Nobel Prize.”

Perhaps that continues to be true. The new, highly anticipated collection of Heaney’s poems, released in the United States this month, makes an unfortunate departure from his legacy of rigor, answering a reading public’s hunger for an expanded oeuvre, for more of the “product” that Heaney feared, later in life, he had become. The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis, includes 25 previously unpublished poems, chosen by his family and situated in an appendix, and virtually all published but previously uncollected poems, chronologically interleaved in 14 sections between his 12 published collections and his 1975 chapbook Stations.

Nearly 500 pages of editorial commentary bulks out the volume; while the notes on the poems are meticulous and helpful, listing all variants of specific words and lines, they remind the reader that the contents of this large book might have been better apportioned across three volumes: one of Heaney’s published collections with the detailed apparatus, a second of his published but previously uncollected poems, and a third substantial sampling of unpublished poems derived from the poet’s papers.

This trio would have made a fine set. In the judicious publication of famous poets’ collected and previously uncollected work, we have the examples of Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box (2006), a collection of unpublished poems and drafts from her archive, one distinct from Bishop’s 2011 volumes Poems and Prose; and Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems (1971), which was followed by editions of his previously unpublished poems in Early Writing (1977) and Poems Retrieved (1977). These multiple volumes are inviting to poetry readers and scholars alike.

Regrettably, Heaney’s readers will confront, in this collection, the mild disorientation of a dog’s breakfast. I kept referring to the table of contents—and the book’s erudite notes—to locate myself in the vertiginous swim of the volume’s 1,200-plus pages, which transits back and forth, in a tidal motion, between uncollected and collected poems, often radically different in merit: the sand keeps shifting under the reader’s feet.

The juxtapositions this arrangement entails are often absurd. For example, we encounter “The Stirling Stanzas,” which Heaney wrote for his receipt of an honorary degree from Scotland’s University of Stirling, beside the “Golden Bough,” the first poem in Seeing Things (1991), Heaney’s verse translation of a riveting passage in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. Thus, the reader encounters light verse, such as in this Burns stanza:

        At times in Dublin life is tame
        So when a certain letter came
        And said in June if I was game
                        And came to Stirling
        They’d put new letters to my name—
                        My heart went birling.

This poem is immediately followed by the mythic opening lines of “The Golden Bough”:

So from the back of her shrine the Sibyl of Cumae
Chanted fearful equivocal words and made the cave echo
With sayings where clear truths and mysteries
Were inextricably twined. Apollo turned and twisted
His spurs at her breast, gave her her head, then reined in her spasms.

Venturing from commencement cheer to writhing Sibyl’s prophecies is jarring. After several such hairpin turns, I began to feel as if I had the reader’s equivalent of the bends. This illustrates why it would be instructive—and less dizzying—to read what Heaney deliberately left out of his collections in one stand-alone volume. So, too, would it be valuable to have a broader selection of unpublished poems from those Heaney left in his papers: it would further democratize the archive, enabling scholars and students everywhere to read manuscript drafts. Perhaps democratization was the editors’ intention, but in this volume, we are unable to see the cathedral of Heaney’s achievement for the clutter of the scaffolding.

Among the archival poems in the appendix, there are several notable standouts, including “Hawthorns,” “Oral English,” and “Swallow.” These are tantalizing: they show the poet’s grappling with the domestic face of civil war, the linguistic prejudices of local “disdains and intonations,” and—in the figure of a small bird—the possible transmigration of the soul. Heaney deserves a full volume culled from his archive, but one that does not obscure his legacy with miscellany, his grandeur with grist.

Even typographically, the volume feels overstuffed—a crowded cocktail party in which it takes strategy and athletic maneuvers to reach the good canapés. Unlike the magisterial Poems 1962–2012 of fellow Nobelist Louise Glück, whose poems appear on individual pages, or Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 (2017) by Heaney’s friend Frank Bidart, also printed singly to the page, the poems in this new collection are printed continuously. Section breaks within poems do not appear on separate pages, departing from the formatting (of page breaks with section breaks) that Heaney chose for his individual collections.

And it does not help that the volume begins with juvenilia: these 29 poems, dating from 1959, form an odd introduction to one of the most important recent poets in the English language. Reading the volume’s third poem, “Nostalgia in the Afternoon,” one conjures a collegiate Heaney, word-drunk on drafts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, influences he had not yet subdued into a musicality all his own. Consider the first stanza:

        Great blue-scooped sky, arching above me,
        Breeze-winnowed, shell-sounding and bubbling white
            With the smooth soap-slip caressing of pot-bellied clouds,
        I leap towards your high intangible blueness
                                With Gothic agility.

Published under the pseudonym “Incertus” in Queen’s University’s journal Gorgon, this poem rhapsodizes for another four stanzas; it shows the poet at an early stage, one in which he has not yet learned how to attach an exploration of metaphysical states to the furniture of daily living. Indeed, the speaker of “Nostalgia in the Afternoon” is full of Wordsworthian helium, ready to “leap […] With Gothic agility” toward the empyrean.

Luckily, Heaney trained his galloping ear—and, in poems like “Digging,” got his feet and pen firmly planted on solid ground. The astounding growth in Heaney’s work between 1959 and 1966 might be attributable to a variety of influences, including his maturing into adulthood, his fortunate marriage to Marie Devlin, his discovery of the poetry of Ted Hughes, and his work with the literary critic Philip Hobsbaum and the “Belfast Group” of writers.

Queen’s University professor Hobsbaum, a Leavisite born to Polish Jewish parents in London, assembled a workshop of emerging writers in his adopted city who, according to scholar Heather Clark’s 2006 book The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972, met for several “terms” totaling 64 weeks between 1963 and 1966. Hobsbaum encouraged and challenged the members of his cohort, and this gathering brought the Catholic Heaney into friendship with the Protestant poet Michael Longley: for both, it was their first major alliance across the sectarian divide.

Within a few years, Heaney had leavened his neoromanticism with prosaic clarity. He had located—in Hobsbaum, Longley, and his wife—a trinity who backed him in the task of becoming himself, as he manufactured his literary style and standards. Indeed, a late-life letter from Heaney to Longley (in July 2010) reveals his enduringly stern self-judgment, hearkening back to his advice to Deane 44 years earlier. “I suddenly realize also,” Heaney writes, “that Human Chain does not include ‘The City’: I wish it had got itself into surer, stranger shape, but while I felt it was a fond salute for the festschrift [for you], it didn’t seem to me strong enough as a bookpoem—as Plath might have said.” Sureness, strangeness, strength: Heaney believed that a bookpoem had to upend the commonplace.

“The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world,” Heaney noted in a 1991 interview with The Economist. His truth-telling about the politics of the heart, the violence endemic to the human condition, and the ghostliness of memory, in poems as sure and strange as they are musical and moving, is what won him international distinction. This new volume, perhaps reacting to the globalization of “the famous Seamus,” as Deane called him, errs in the direction of Heaney as parent and pal, party toast and parochial muse, neglecting the stringency to which he held his own work.

The volume’s editors undoubtedly had the best of intentions, aiming to show the full scope of Heaney’s published poems and his appeal to audiences “both critical and popular,” following the “torchlight” of his inclinations. Yet the reader can’t help but feel disoriented in confronting 14 sections of uncollected poems alongside the near-Euclidean perfection of the poet’s tightly curated books. Luckily, the best poets have a way of evading less-than-satisfactory editions: such troublesome arrangements fade over time and don’t alter the essential portrait granted by the poems themselves.