Heaney and American Poetry: The California Narrative

This essay examines the body of critical material concerned with Seamus Heaney’s relationship with American poetry and offers a new perspective from which to approach the Irish poet in relation to his claimed American influences of Gary Snyder and Robert Bly. Existing criticism maintains a narrative in which his 1970-1 Berkeley residency (and the Bay Area poetry he encountered there) liberated him from an antithetical, constraining poetics. My research contends the stylistic developments of Wintering Out (1972) and Stations (1975) were mostly facilitated by distance from Ireland rather than Bay Area poetry, and that the argument which emerges in the critical studies in the ‘80s and ‘90s largely follows a trail left by Heaney himself, who may have sought to redefine the Berkeley residency as a period of experimentation rather than hesitation, as it was originally understood in early reviews of