Memory and Belonging: Irish Writers, Radio, and the Nation

When Seamus Heaney accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, his address in Stockholm, "Crediting Poetry" made explicit a connection between \ radio and literature in Ireland. Heaney's charming evocation of the earliest ; intrusion of the outside world into the small secure world of his farmhouse childhood in County Derry begins and ends with the radio as sound. When he refers to "an aerial wire attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree " we immediately recall the emblematic chestnut tree in the poem "Clearances " and the deft transition from radio to literature is complete. Heaney specifically links his earliest radio memories in "Crediting Poetry" to World War II, a time which brought enormous advances in technology? nearly all of which, incidentally, were aural: sonar and radio, radio telegraphy and telephony, and radio itself. In his address, Heaney quickly progresses to a discussion of the basis of most aural communication?spoken language. As the radio dial spun, foreign languages flickered to life, as dialects of his own language which, he suggests, offered?"a stability conferred by a musically sat isfying order of sounds":