HEANEY, Seamus. The Fire i’ the Flint: Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Signed by the Author)

London: Published for The British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1975. pp. 21. Green printed wrappers. Signed by Seamus Heaney on title page. Near fine.

This scarce pamphlet prints Heaney’s Chatterton Lecture on an English Poet, delivered before The British Academy in 1974. It represents one of his earliest extended works of literary criticism and marks a crucial moment in his developing engagement with the idea of poetic vocation. In this finely argued essay, Heaney explores the creative tension between asceticism and exuberance in Hopkins’s verse, reflecting on the “dark embryo” of artistic act and the forging of poetic identity.

The lecture is particularly revealing of Heaney’s own evolving poetics—his sense of the poem as a “forging in the smithy,” where labour, grace, and language meet. It anticipates the moral and aesthetic concerns that would come to define his later critical prose in Preoccupations (1980). Printed by Vivian Ridler at the University Press, Oxford, this is one of the most desirable of Heaney’s early publications, seldom found signed.

References: Brandes & Durkan A9.

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