Chapter One sets out to trace Heaney’s early Catholic formation at home, school and parish. It begins in his childhood home of Mossbawn, where a strong devotional piety was a product of what the historian Emmet Larkin called the ‘devotional revolution’ of the nineteenth century. Central to this piety was an emphasis on Marian devotion and the visual and tactile appeal of Catholic sacramental practice. The domestic piety of Mossbawn takes a more formal shape in the learning of the catechism at Anahorish Primary School and in more developed catechesis at St Columb’s College in Derry, where Heaney was a boarder. It was at St Columb’s that Heaney first came across the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet who was to have the greatest influence on his early apprentice work. I trace the influence of Hopkins from Heaney’s early unpublished work to later poems such as ‘Seeing the Sick’ in Electric Light. Heaney’s later introduction to the work of Patrick Kavanagh provided him with the validation of his earliest writing instincts about the local landscape and the centrality of parish as a guarantor of the local.

The Introduction begins with a fax which Seamus Heaney sent to Professor Eamon Duffy (Cambridge University) in 2001. The fax was a response to Duffy’s book The Voices of Morebath, in which he tells the story of the desacralising of a small Catholic community during the English Reformation. Heaney’s response to the book draws parallels between the medieval world of Morebath and the world of Mossbawn, where he grew up and which was foundational to his experience of Catholicism and his growth as a poet. I draw attention, in particular, to the centrality of Marian devotion for the parishioners of Morebath and for Heaney as a child. What Heaney’s fax shows is the emotional purchase which Catholicism continued to exert upon him long after he had moved away from adherence to religious orthodoxy or practice. By placing Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism in a broader historical context than has been the case up until now, I show how it operates in ways other than social and political, concluding that Catholicism remains foundational to Heaney’s work at the level of what I call a felt sense.

I read District and Circle (2006) in the context of a poetry of praise and the influence of Czesław Miłosz. Heaney’s poetry of praise is intimately connected to his sense of place and the title of the collection suggests that Heaney is circling back over his childhood district of Mossbawn. When Heaney turns to Virgil in his final collection Human Chain (2010), he does so partly in place of a Catholicism that has been increasingly displaced throughout his work. However, I conclude that the foundational questions of Heaney’s childhood faith – post-mortem existence, how we commune with the dead, the longing for something beyond the bounds of material sense – account, in part, for his turning to Virgil and, specifically, to Book VI of the Aeneid, a full translation of which was posthumously published in 2016. In the end, in a synthesis of Christian and Classical, Heaney’s poetry finds a unifying vision which allows him to retain a felt sense for his Catholic upbringing even as he moves beyond its orthodox expression.