2026 Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture with Nicholas Allen: "Heaney in the Seventies"

Like many immigrants to the United States, I come from a troubled place. When I see images of armed soldiers on the capital streets it reminds me of my own child and early adulthood. In the mid-eighties I took the school bus daily through the iron cordon that ringed central Belfast, the security guard smiling cheerfully as she checked under seats for bombs. That world is far from contemporary Ireland, but its psychic architecture remains. I tried to capture the consequences of this experience in my recent book, Late Heaney, which was published earlier this year. There, I explored the landscapes and people that shaped Seamus Heaney’s poetry after the Nobel Prize. Now I have begun writing a book about poetry, society and the early phases of what became a decades long civil war. Heaney in the Seventies is a study of a time unexpectedly like the present, violent, chaotic and hanging on by the slightest of civic threads.

 

Heaney understood his ethical responsibility as an artist as a local awareness. His predicament was historical and contemporary, and Heaney in the Seventies will bring out the granularity of this decade as it registers in his writing, from Bellaghy to Berkeley. This has not been done before in context of his three major collections of the period: Wintering Out (1972), North (1975) and Field Work (1979). This feels overdue, now that our world is again a place of banned books, and words in hiding. For all that Heaney’s subsequent work is associated with the prospect of peace, that horizon was so dim then as to be near invisible. Heaney did catch its aurora, and in Heaney in the Seventies we will think about a poet in extremity, vulnerable on ‘the long foray’. We will also think about wrong turns and experiments, about family and friends, and about Heaney learning to write what would become his major form, the elegy.

 

We will range widely through Heaney’s work in the talk and discussion, but if you’d like to read 'Casualty’, ‘A Postcard from North Antrim’, ’The Strand at Lough Beg’, and ‘Badgers’ from Field Work we will have common ground to share. 

Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center and Baldwin Professor in the Humanities at the University of Georgia. His new book, Late Heaney, will be published by Oxford University Press in January 2026. He has written and edited many books and essays, including Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Coastal Works (Oxford University Press, 2017). Allen has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.