Chapter 1 - Scotland

Summary

The alertness to the languages and literatures of Scotland that marks Seamus Heaney’s work in all its stages is rooted in an awareness of the Scottish derivation of much of the distinctive lexis of his native region. Ignorance of and even antipathy towards Lowland dialect and culture occasionally surfaces in Irish writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance in Carleton and Yeats. Heaney’s enthusiasm for Scotland was in some respects anticipated by James Joyce, another etymologically obsessed Irish writer, though it is notable that, unlike the novelist’s, the poet’s interests included the Highland Gaelic as well as the Lowland English and Scots aspects of Scottish literary achievement. The chapter traces Heaney’s sustained engagement with Scotland in his separate capacities as editor, translator and poet and concludes by examining key intertexts between his poetry and that of Hugh MacDiarmid.