Seamus Heaney’s <i>Beowulf</i> and the Limits of Lyric

Whereas most historical poetics scholarship characterizes the passage of time as something that obscures some earlier formal coherence, works such as Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf translation (2000), Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), and Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2014) view the centuries if not millennia separating them from a canonical precursor (e.g., Homer, Chaucer) as a source of generic and cultural possibility. Such works, produced by contemporary poets most at home in the relatively short, non-narrative, first-person mode of lyric, pursue a generic dialectic of sorts, in which the prior work’s narrative, socializing, obdurate basis in history is made answerable to the inward, idiosyncratic, dehistoricizing impulses of lyric, even as the modern poets’ lived experiences as global and postcolonial subjects find unexpected parallels in the premodern literary past. Focusing on Heaney, this essay moves freely between his Beowulf translation and individual lyrics of the same period, structuring its inquiry around two resonant Irish words—thole and hoke—that appear in both contexts. It argues that the brand of historical poetics Heaney develops, like that developed in Walcott’s and Agbabi’s creative retellings, is valuable precisely for its willingness to admit and even celebrate formal abstraction and transformation as necessary components of any attempt to connect across wide swaths of time and space.