1 - ‘Living roots awaken in my head’: Place and Displacement

Summary

Seamus Heaney first began publishing his poems during his time as an undergraduate at Queen's University in Belfast, when a number of pieces by him appeared in various student magazines. In 1963 he became a member of Philip Hobsbaum's 'Belfast Group’, an informal gathering of young writers who would meet regularly at Hobsbaum's Belfast home to critique each other's work. Hobsbaum greatly admired Heaneys poetry and he exercised his influence to secure Heaney an entry into the London publishing world. Through these contacts, Heaney was eventually offered a contract with Faber & Faber, who published his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, and who have remained his primary publishers ever since.

The poem which opens Death of a Naturalist is ‘Digging’. It not only appears on the opening page of this volume, but also takes its place as the first poem in Heaney's Selected Poems (1980), his New Selected Poems (1990) and in Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (1998). Heaney indicates his sense of the poem's significance when he writes in Preoccupations that:

'Digging’, in fact, was the name of the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words. … I wrote it in the summer of 1964, almost two years after I had begun to ‘dabble in verses’. This was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life. (P. 41)

As Heaney indicates here, he views ‘Digging’ as marking something like a point of departure for his career as a poet. We might say that this is true not only in terms of the poem's formal achievement in translating, as Heaney puts it, ‘feeling into words’, but also in the sense that ‘Digging’ registers, in small compass, many of the themes and concerns that would dominate his early poetry, in addition to providing an early glimpse of certain other issues that would surface as important elements later in his writing.