Aeneid Book VI
SEAMUS HEANEY

Seamus Heaney suffered a long, long haunting by the ghost of Virgil, and especially by one particular book from the  Aeneid , of which this is a translation on which he was still working when he died in 2013. In an introductory note, he refers to the fact that the compulsion to render the entire thing seized hold of him in 2007, when he wrote a sequence of poems entitled “Route 110”. That sequence of 12 poems appeared in Human Chain, the final poetry collection he published during his lifetime, and it begins with the poet buying a fusty old copy of Aeneid VI from a bookshop. Thereafter Virgil dips in and out, poem by poem, like a breathing shade, past evoking present and present past.

What Heaney did not quite make clear to us in that note was that he had been ­dallying with that key, inspirational text by Virgil, on and off, for years, and especially so in a 1991 collection of poems called Seeing Things , about which Heaney’s entire career, considered now in respectful hindsight, seems to pivot; the book which, after years of overshadowing by the Troubles, seems to be an act of spiritual expansion; in which he begins not only to credit marvels, but to have the courage and the lung capacity to embrace once again such big words as “soul” and “spirit”.