Seamus Heaney’s Prisoners

This article focuses on the role that prisoners play in the poems of Seamus Heaney. From the time of the introduction of internment in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, Heaney’s poems frequently touch on prisoners, the conditions in which they are held, and how they might be conceptualized. This article discusses how these poems reflect contemporaneous political discourse regarding prisoners. It also shows how Heaney’s engagements with prisoners are refracted, characteristically, through his earliest memories, and through his knowledge of literature. In particular, Second World War POWs and Heaney’s knowledge of Russian authors, including Osip Mandelstam and Anton Chekhov, provide significant contexts for his engagements with Troubles-era prisoners. Drawing on materials from the Heaney Literary Papers held in the National Library of Ireland, this article demonstrates how the conditions in which internees were held shaped ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’ in North (1975). Finally, it discusses the roles Nelson Mandela, and the prisoners of conscience campaigned for by Amnesty International, play in his work. This paper concludes that, although Heaney was resolute in not promoting violence, his attitudes towards those who perpetrated it, and were imprisoned for it, were complex and changing.