Seamus Heaney's Audio Archive

In 2009 as part of a weeklong program of events in honour of Seamus Heaney's seventieth birthday, RTE released a fifteen-CD box set entitled Seamus Heaney: Collected poems. It contained the poets readings of all eleven of his major volumes to that point, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to District and Circle (2006). On April 13th the twelve-hour recording was broadcast in its entirety on RTE radio 1, followed by a program televised live from the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and the debut of Charlie McCarthy's feature-length documentary Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous. These tributes represented not only a measure of Heaney's standing and his work's extraordinary connection with the public but also the culmination of a long and mutually rewarding relationship with Irish broadcasting. Before the arrival of this CD box set, the complete works of Heaney's poetry had never been collected in one place. This essay explores the ways in which Heaney's poetic life has been shaped by oral traces, from radio work and commercial recordings (including the important RTE box set) to a process composition which is, he suggests in Stepping Stones, "dictated by the inner ear".