The earliest written poetry in Ireland is mediated through a Christian lens. Monasticmanuscripts reveal rich strata of pre-Christian myths and poetic forms that bleed intoChristian content, potentially disrupting the intended orthodoxy. These texts display aknotwork of pagan and Christian elements, equally alert to the natural world and theincarnational word.  A delight in the materiality of the word, in the miraculous powerof the manuscript, is a distinctive feature of this early poetry, and tells us somethingabout the high status of the poet in traditional Gaelic society. The preservation ofGaelic myths and values by monastic scribes provided Revivalist poets like Yeatswith a pre-Christian Irish identity rooted in the power of nature, and allowed Yeats tofind a way to be Irish and not Catholic. The pagan world kicks back against Christianorthodoxy again in the work of later poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, AustinClarke, and Paula Meehan.

Chapter One sets out to trace Heaney’s early Catholic formation at home, school and parish. It begins in his childhood home of Mossbawn, where a strong devotional piety was a product of what the historian Emmet Larkin called the ‘devotional revolution’ of the nineteenth century. Central to this piety was an emphasis on Marian devotion and the visual and tactile appeal of Catholic sacramental practice. The domestic piety of Mossbawn takes a more formal shape in the learning of the catechism at Anahorish Primary School and in more developed catechesis at St Columb’s College in Derry, where Heaney was a boarder. It was at St Columb’s that Heaney first came across the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet who was to have the greatest influence on his early apprentice work. I trace the influence of Hopkins from Heaney’s early unpublished work to later poems such as ‘Seeing the Sick’ in Electric Light. Heaney’s later introduction to the work of Patrick Kavanagh provided him with the validation of his earliest writing instincts about the local landscape and the centrality of parish as a guarantor of the local.