The ‘Station island’ sequence that forms the heart of the collection that bears its name is Seamus Heaney's most extensive adaptation of Dante, a reworking of the Commedia in a contemporary Irish context, where a pilgrimage by the poet to Lough Derg, the Station Island of the title, leads to encounters with a number of ghostly interlocutors, some of whom are literary predecessors, others figures from Heaney's life. While this sequence forms the heart of the discussion here, it is none the less necessary to note that Heaney's engagement with Dante extends well beyond this single, albeit substantial, work, and that Dante is a regular presence in Heaney's work from Field Work onwards. This is particularly the case for both Field Work and Seeing Things: the former containing several elegies, the latter in part an extended elegy for Heaney's father. Like Station Island, each of these books makes use of Dante primarily in the context of a dialogue with the dead, and each closes with a translation from the Inferno.

Heaney and Dante (1): ‘Field Work’

Dante's first appearance in Heaney's poetry is in 1979's Field Work. Dante is present most substantially in the closing poem, ‘Ugolino,’ a translation from cantos XXXII and XXXIII of the Inferno, but his presence is implicit throughout. Six of the forty-one poems in the collection are elegies. Three of these are for fellow workers in the field of art: ‘Elegy’ for Robert Lowell, ‘In Memoriam Sean O'Riada’ for the composer named in the poem's title, and ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ for the Meath poet killed in the First World War while serving in the British army.