ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney first read about Mandelstam’s astonishingly tragic fate as a poet under Stalin during the 1920s and 1930s in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope. By 1995, when he won the Nobel Prize, Heaney attributed a significant area of his poetic development to the Russian poet. Bernard O’Donoghue, Michael Parker, Stephen James, and Clare Cavanagh are among critics who point out affinities between Mandelstam and Heaney. Heaney’s situation is much less extreme than this: he deals with his own conscience as violence and public expectation probe the boundaries of his inner freedom. The Heaney–Sweeney figure certainly shows the predisposition towards exile in Heaney’s mind and a readiness to engage with the more complex figure of Mandelstam. Heaney expresses ‘longing’ to ‘credit’ poetry — the language is evocative of loss, of desire — more than an inability to choose a political-aesthetic stance.
