Neil Corcoran's Wrong-Headed Criticism of Seamus Heaney

I’m currently reading Neil Corcoran’s The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1998). In the Preface, Corcoran says he hopes his book “offers some original and provocative readings and re-readings” of Heaney’s work. Well, it didn’t take him long to provoke me. In the book’s first chapter, titled “Roots and Readings: Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), he says some of Death of a Naturalist’s poems, including “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed,” “tend toward pastiche.” He writes,

These poems have their eyes so eagerly trained on The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, Hughes’s first two books, that, even allowing for the element of comedy that undoubtedly inheres in them too, they tend towards pastiche.

I disagree. Ted Hughes wrote about hawks, crows, sheep, eels; Heaney wrote about turkeys, cows, trout. Both wrote about the natural world. But that’s where the similarity ends. Hughes’s governing aesthetic is violence. Helen Vendler says of him, “This is a poet who wants to write words like “Blood ball swollen” and “sliced … throat strings” and “hacked-off head” (The Music of What Happens, 1988). Heaney’s aesthetic, in Death of a Naturalist, is pleasure – sensuous, tactile description: “He once complained extravagantly / In an overture of gobbles; / He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud / With a grey flick of his Confucian eye” (“Turkeys Observed”); “It seems she has swallowed a barrel. / From forelegs to haunches, / her belly is slung like a hammock” (“Cow in Calf”); “Hangs, a fat gun-barrel, / deep under arched bridges / or slips like butter down / the throat of the river” (“Trout”); “Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. / The rod jerked with precise convulsions, / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations” (“The Diviner”). 

Corcoran rightly praises certain Death of a Naturalist poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” “Blackberry-Picking,” for their striking alliteration and onomatopoeia. But his characterization of “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed” as “pastiche” is wrong-headed. Heaney imitated no one.