Irish Heaney

7/31/2019 Irish Heaney

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SEAMUS HEANEY

(b. 1939)

08/04/2011


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SEAMUS HEANEY

northern Irish Catholic

rural County Derry - the "country of the mind"where much of Heaney's poetry is grounded

Nobel prize winner, 1995

Heaneys poems came to public attention in themid-1960s

a "Northern School" within Irish writing


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SEAMUS HEANEY

Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (hiscontemporaries)

Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran

Carson (members of a younger Northern Irishgeneration)

the fate of having been born into a society deeplydivided along religious and political lines


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SEAMUS HEANEY

the effect of darkening the mood of Heaney's workin the 1970s

giving him a deep preoccupation with thequestion of poetry's responsibilities andprerogatives in the world

poetry settled somewhere between a need forcreative freedom within itself and a pressure toexpress the sense of social obligation felt by thepoet as citizen


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Death of a Naturalist (1966) firstcollection

Door into the Dark (1969)

the local and the familiar

You write about the things you know.

(Kavanagh)


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SEAMUS HEANEY

country customs, crafts and trades act asanalogues for writing

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests: snug as a gun

I'll dig with it.(from Digging)


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SEAMUS HEANEY

a continuity btw Heaney and his turf-cuttingfather and grandfather

a telluric poet - preoccupied with land

the ground of sectarian division and of

dispossession

if this was the country of community it was also

the realm of division


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SEAMUS HEANEY

questions about the conflict between self-

expression and the public voice

the struggle betweenan identification with aliterary tradition and the instinct of individuality

the inclination of most post-Yeatsian poetry, tobecome more universal, to transcend the

limitations of the local


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SEAMUS HEANEY

living in a bifurcated (divided) society, ahalf-culture that exists as a result of theclash of British and Irish traditions in

Northern Ireland

as an Ulsterman he has inherited a literarytradition that is two-humped


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SEAMUS HEANEY

I speak and write in English, but do notaltogether share the preoccupations andperspectives of an Englishman. I teach Englishliterature, I publish in London, but the Englishtradition is not ultimately home. I live offanother hump as well. At school I studied theGaelic literature of Ireland, as well as the literatureof England, as since then I have maintained a

notion of myself as Irish in province thatinsists it is British.


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SEAMUS HEANEY

developed an aesthetic in which the hard,masculineconsonants of Protestant Englishculturebulled the softer, feminine words of

Gaelic tradition the Gaelic heritageremains culturally and

politically central to the poet and his work


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attempts to respond to the Troubles

attempts to find a suitable metaphor(objective correlative) that could express hisfeelings about events in Northern Ireland


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SEAMUS HEANEY

Wintering Out (1972)

North (1975)Heaneys most contentious book

the issues ofvoyeurism, necrophilia, blood

sacrifice etc.

inspired by The Bog People, a book by a Danish

archaeologist, V. P. Glob


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SEAMUS HEANEY

boglandas an important symbolic insight intothe nature of Irish history and identity

the construction of a historical myth by which

recent violence might be placed and understoodwithin a larger frame

attempted to translate the violence of thepast into the violence of the present


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SEAMUS HEANEY

Punishment (from North)

when the IRA tars and feathers a woman forfraternizing with British soldiers, he is reminded of

a parallel case of a 14-year old Danish girlsacrificed to the land in an ancient fertility rite

pornography and violence

the aestheticising representation of violence


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SEAMUS HEANEY

Heaney accused of the use of genderstereotypes

gendered fetishization, and the deploymentof male gaze which objectivizes anditemizes women as Other


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SEAMUS HEANEY

the bog preserves not just bodies but

consciousness

the effect ofdistancing contemporary

violencebog' as a sign of abjection (extremely degrading

situation)


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SEAMUS HEANEY

I have always listened for poems, they comesometimes like bodies come out of bog, almostcomplete, seeming to have been laid down a long

time ago, surfacing with a touch of mystery Ithink the process is a kind of somnambulistencounter btw masculine will and intelligence andfeminine clusters of image and emotion.

Documents

Irish Heaney