Новая книга Гэри Уэйд раскрывает влияние католицизма на творчество Сэмуэля Хини

The question of religious feeling in Irish art, particularly in relation to the North, has been so long politically fraught that its consideration has become more often the byproduct of other considerations. Gary Wade’s Seamus Heaney and Catholicism will be a lasting answer to any future inquiry, providing an astute and comprehensive account of the afterlife of Catholic imagery in Heaney’s poetry, long after his spiritual belief wandered elsewhere. The book’s essential term is radiance, that light that illuminates Heaney’s art as it proceeds, and which Wade associates with a Catholic incarnation of love, an attention to others that Wade traces carefully throughout. The book is organised in sequential chapters that study clusters of Heaney’s collections, with Station Island the pivot around which the whole turns. This leads to fascinating discussions on the influence of Dante and Virgil on Heaney, and later of Czesław Milosz. If sometimes the iteration of Catholicism as a first principle from which all things proceed is at odds with Heaney’s historical imagination, Wade’s deep learning gives the readings a proper substance to argue against. The book begins with Heaney’s fax to the great Irish scholar Eamon Duffy about Duffy’s then recent study of a small Catholic community on the edges of Exmoor in the throes of the Reformation. The psychic violence of this dissolution spoke to Heaney’s own sense of the turbulent times he lived in. READ MORE Wade feels that Heaney lived through a similarly secularising and transitional moment, the counterbalance to which is a version of the home place as originary and grounded. Wade describes some aspects of Heaney’s childhood society as similarly medieval, and locates Church Island in nearby Lough Beg as one key site of devotion. That the church spire Heaney sees in his poetry of that place is a folly addition by an 18th-century Anglican bishop goes undeclared. It is a small point, but it suggests a general tension between art as a procedure and as illumination. Both can be read in Heaney’s poetry, most interestingly in mutual relation, where one does not overshadow the other, but each enlightens, as Wade often does in those passages where the radiant shines through. As we wait for the official biography to appear, Seamus Heaney and Catholicism lays a major intellectual foundation for the influence of religious thought and feeling in the poet’s work. Nicholas Allen is Baldwin professor in the humanities at the University of Georgia. His latest book is Late Heaney, (Oxford University Press, 2026)