Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry

Rachel Falconer is Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature at the University of Lausanne. Her publications include A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature, edited with Madeleine Scherer, and Hell in Contemporary Literature: Descent Narratives since 1945.

• Introduction 1. The Golden Bough and the Absent Tree 2. Threshold Crossings in Seeing Things 3. Orpheus in a Major Key 4. Pastoral, Pietas and Stealth5. ‘Terra tremens’: District and Circle6. ‘In river country’: The Riverbank Field7. Raids, Settlement and Sounding Line 8. Cadence and Lapse in Human Chain 9. A Double Music: Aeneid Book VI Coda: ‘Mossbawn via Mantua’Appendix: ‘Palinurus’Bibliography Index

To celebrate the book for its exhaustiveness is no faint praise. Anyone who ever wants to investigate Heaney’s engagement with Vergil will be grateful to Falconer for methodically drawing together and bringing to light an unprecedented hoard of primary materials, some archival, others ephemeral, many rare or hard to access. Radio essays and interviews, little-known Heaney poems, limited editions light up her subject from as many angles as possible. As a research tool, Falconer’s book is indispensable.