Seamus Heaney and the Belfast Group: Revising on His Own

Abstract

It was Seamus Heaney’s practice to submit poems that were to appear in Death of a Naturalist to the Belfast Group. He did not, however, bring all of them for the weekly discussions and published some just as they had appeared in the journals they were first published in. He did some revising independent of the Group, and this essay argues that when Heaney revised on his own the principles of the Group influenced his practice: he was sometimes successful in those independent revisions, sometimes not. Two poems demonstrate his practice. His revisions of “The Barn” eliminated awkward repetition, achieved clarity, and enhanced the emotion of fear experienced by the boy character. The revisions he made on his own for “Ancestral Photograph”, however, were not all successful; after the Group discussed the poem, Heaney made additional effective revisions, correcting all but one of the original missteps.

Keywords

• Seamus Heaney
• Manuscript Revision
• Twentieth-century Irish Poetry
• Belfast Group
• “The Barn”
• “Ancestral Photograph”