Ireland's Nobel Prize Winners
When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the local newspaper ran with the headline "Bellaghy Farmer's Son Wins Major Prize". He became the fourth Irish person to receive the award after Samuel Beckett (1969), George Bernard Shaw (1925), and W.B. Yeats, (1923). (It is said that when W.B. Yeats heard he had won the prize, they cooked a few sausages to celebrate.)
In Heaney's Nobel Lecture, "Crediting Poetry" (December 7, 1995), he refers to the two Irelands at either end of the 20th Century and sees a comparison between Ireland at the time of his award and the Ireland of 1924, when W.B. Yeats received it.
Both periods had been ones of destructive violence, which was not a milieu that would encourage the development of a personal body of work resulting in the reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was interesting that Yeats, in his speech, barely attended to the disruptive violence while Heaney discussed the situation in Northern Ireland at length.
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change. Violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue. It should have come early, as the result of the ferment of protest on the streets in the late sixties, but that was not to be and the eggs of danger which were always incubating got hatched out very quickly. While the Christian moralist in oneself was impelled to deplore the atrocious nature of the IRA's campaign of bombings and killings, and the "mere Irish" in oneself was appalled by the ruthlessness of the British Army on occasions like Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, the minority citizen in oneself, the one who had grown up conscious that his group was distrusted and discriminated against in all kinds of official and unofficial ways, this citizen's perception was at one with the poetic truth of the situation in recognizing that if life in Northern Ireland were ever really to flourish, change had to take place. But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
When the poet W.B. Yeats stood on this platform more than seventy years ago, Ireland was emerging from the throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the heels of a war of independence fought against the British. The struggle that ensued had been brief enough; it was over by May, 1923, some seven months before Yeats sailed to Stockholm, but it was bloody, savage and intimate, and for generations to come it would dictate the terms of politics within the twenty-six independent counties of Ireland, that part of the island known first of all as the Irish Free State and then subsequently as the Republic of Ireland.
Seamus Heaney - "Crediting Poetry" 07/12/1995
George Bernard Shaw
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William Butler Yeats
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The images above are sculptures by John Coll, and are available from Kennys Gallery.