Review of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024)
“Oil, oil, oil,” wrote the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in early October, 2002: “Bush prefers to go to war than to raise the price of petrol.” America’s commander in chief had the previous month called the looming Operation Iraqi Freedom “a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal.” The effects of the illegal war, including the hundreds of thousands of dead, were yet to be realized. But some had a sense of it: “The Democrats are sheepish,” Heaney continued, “and there seems to be no realization or care that an American attack in Iraq will send recruitment for Al Qaeda sky high and create general Arab disaffection.” Over the next two decades, the poet’s righteous anger would be vindicated.
Heaney went on to contribute to a literary anthology in support of the Irish antiwar movement at a time when Shannon Airport was in regular use by the US military, despite Ireland’s vaunted neutrality. “I oppose this war with a mute passion, a pain of deep anxiety that cannot fiend coherent expression,” Brian Friel, the acclaimed dramatist, stated in his introduction to the volume, adding that there was “something indeed” about the American aggression that “offends the notion of what it is to be fully human.” “Courageous, clarifying stuff,” Heaney remarked enthusiastically to his friend in their subsequent correspondence, praising him for his eloquence, “full of rage, reasonableness and ‘nature’, as my mother would have called it.”
If the discernment was characteristic of Heaney, this was perhaps less true of the forthrightness and antagonistic tenor of his political…
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Auteur: Ciarán O’Rourke
