BPR 53 | 2026
In the 1990s, I went to a lecture titled “Cultural Roots, Divided Identities, and Cross-Pollination in Contemporary Poetry.” For about 45 minutes, the speaker focused on the way Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, and Li-Young Lee “made it new” by letting their different cultural identities—Caribbean, Indian, Asian—interact productively. A friend approached me at the reception afterwards and said, “You know—that lecture made me think of something my supervisor in graduate school said about Seamus Heaney.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“He told me that Heaney was an American poet.”
“Really? Didn’t he know that Heaney grew up in Northern Ireland and that his best poetry was about the long history of Anglo-Irish conflicts?”
“I reminded my supervisor of that, but he just smiled and shook his head. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘Believe me—Heaney is an American poet.’”
“Was your supervisor playing around with alternative facts or something?”
“I wasn’t sure, so I told him to give me proof. That’s when he laughed and said, ‘You don’t need proof. Heaney’s talent warrants the presumption.’”
“Oh, I get it,” I said, laughing
“Yeah, it’s sort of funny, but I suppose Heaney was American in some ways,” my friend remarked. Then he walked over to the wine-and-beer table.
While doing research and writing about Heaney over the last few decades, I’ve often thought about that joke and wondered if a case could be made for Heaney’s American identity. The concept of “identity,” after all, is complex. Nobody really has one, monolithic identity. Identities are woven from many strands. Or, to use the metaphor from the lecture, they’re pollinated from different sources.
Many of Heaney’s poems certainly show the signs of cross-pollination. Their most obvious American sources are poems by Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, and Robert Lowell. As critics have occasionally complained, some of Heaney’s work—like the Lowell imitations in Field Work—can seem too close to their sources. His most outspoken detractors in Ireland, such as the writer Desmond Fennell, accuse Heaney of being too American in other ways, too. In his long essay “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” Fennell argues that Heaney colluded with what he calls America’s academic-poetic complex, which he compares to America’s military-industrial complex and consumer-capitalist complex, in order to become a literary titan. To Fennell, powerful American critics—especially Heaney’s close friend Harvard professor Helen Vendler—abetted this process by selling the Heaney brand to gullible audiences. Heaney’s repeated denunciations of the American tendency to turn talented people into icons for marketing purposes has had little effect on detractors like Fennel.
To understand Heaney’s ambivalent attitudes toward American culture, it helps to know something about the first time he spent a substantial amount of time in the U.S. This was in 1970–71 when he taught at UC–Berkeley. It’s significant to note that he originally didn’t want to teach in an American university, even though he had friends at the time migrating to the U.S. to earn academic salaries that were a good deal higher than those in Ireland and Britain. He told the Irish poet Padraic Fiacc in 1968, “I wouldn’t like to teach in a U.S. university; you’d always be studying the other poet’s work; everything would finally channel into the other person’s poetry, even your own perceptions.”
