Seamus Heaney 1939– - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Seamus Heaney 1939–

Heaney is widely considered Ireland's most accomplished contemporary poet and has often been called the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats. In his works, Heaney often focuses on the

proper roles and responsibilities of a poet in society, exploring themes of self-discovery and spiritual growth as well as addressing political and cultural issues related to Irish history.

His poetry is characterized by sensuous language, sexual metaphors, and nature imagery

.

But it is important to remember that all of these are themselves stories related through language. Slide2

When we consider conflict, especially in Ireland, it is all too easy to concentrate on the political forgetting the other major areas of conflict which include:

With ourselves and who we are or are to become. Generations (note his poems about his father.)

Gender/relationships, love/hate, hunter and hunted. ( see poem Twice Shy )

Family

Class, work, town/country.Slide3

Much of Heaney's poetry addresses the history of social unrest in Northern Ireland and considers the relevance of poetry in the face of violence and political upheaval. In his next collection

Wintering Out

, for example, are a series of "bog poems" that were inspired by the archaeological excavation of Irish peat bogs containing preserved human bodies that had been ritually slaughtered during the Iron Age. Heaney depicts the victims of such ancient pagan rites as symbolic of the bloodshed caused by contemporary violence in Ireland.

A violence that had a social cause

**Slide4

** We should note the in the past the social cause was to do with rituals concerning crops, fertility and in this sense the continuation of life, culture, civilisation as far as it was one, and the religion/ religious beliefs of the people of the time. There is more than enough information on-line without me repeating here. You can decide for yourself what the social cause of such violence was at the time of the troubles in the six counties but civil rights and fair treatment must come top.Slide5

North (1975) develops this historical theme further, using myth to widen its universality. In such poems as "Ocean's Love to Ireland" and "Act of Union," Heaney portrays the English colonization of Ireland as an act of violent sexual conquest.

Field Work

(1979) does not depart from Heaney's outrage at the violence in Northern Ireland but shifts to a more personal tone. The collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: love and marriage, mortality, and the regenerative powers of self-determination and the poetic imagination.Slide6

The Forge http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ay0sjXrHw

All

I know is a door into the dark.

Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;

Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,

The unpredictable fantail of sparks

Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

The anvil must be somewhere at the centre,

Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,

Set there immoveable: an altar

Where he expends himself in shape and music.

Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,

He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter

Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;

Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick

To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.Slide7

Translating Sweeney Astray (1984) from the Irish tale

Buile

Suibhne

allowed Heaney to work with myth, for he brings to the English-speaking world the warrior-king Sweeney's adventures after a curse has transformed him into a bird.

Station Island

(1984) is also concerned with Irish history and myth. Patterned after Dante's

Divine Comedy

in its tripartite structure, the central section describes a

three day

pilgrimage taken by Catholics to the Irish Station Island seeking spiritual renewal. There the narrator encounters the souls of his dead ancestors and Irish literary figures who speak to him, stirring from him a meditation on his life and art.Slide8

The Haw Lantern (1987) contains both parables of Irish life and poems such as "From the Republic of Conscience" and "From the Canton of Expectation." This volume also includes a series of poems entitled "Clearances," which chronicles his relationship with his mother. In

Seeing Things

(1991) Heaney diverges from his previous emphasis on politics and civic responsibility, returning to the autobiographical themes of childhood experience and Irish community ritual. Feelings of loss and yearning are prominent motifs in the collection, as many poems evoke celebratory images of Heaney's deceased father, who appears frequently throughout the volume.Slide9

Critics of Heaney's early work were immediately impressed by his freshness of expression and command of detail. He has been praised for his political poems, especially those that depict the violence between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. In these poems, it has been noted that Heaney also addresses Ireland's cultural tensions and divisions through the linguistic duality of his poetry, which draws upon both Irish and English literary traditions. Critical commentary has traced the thematic development of Heaney's work, contending that as his later poems continue to address the unrest in Northern Ireland, they also incorporate a more personal tone as Heaney depicts the loss of friends and relatives to the

violence. This is to see the personal within the impersonal,

ie

. English news programmes.Slide10

His most recent work diverges from his previous emphasis on politics and civic responsibility, Heaney returns to the autobiographical themes of childhood experience and Irish community ritual.

Yet he manages to combine themes.

(

See A Constable Calls on following page) Many

critics have

praised

these poems for their imaginative qualities and their focus on visionary transcendence experienced through ordinary life events

. You need only look at some of the titles of his poems where there are titles.Slide11

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,The rubber cowl of a mud-

splasher

Skirting the front mudguard,

Its fat black

handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the "spud"

Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

The pedal treads hanging relieved

Of the boot of the law

.

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair.

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

In his slightly sweating hair.Slide12

He had unstrappedThe heavy ledger, and my father

Was making tillage returns

In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

"Any other root crops?

Mangolds

?

Marrowstems

? Anything like that?"

"No." But was there not a line

Of turnips where the seed ran outSlide13

In the potato field? I assumedSmall

guilts

and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

He stood up, shifted the baton-case

Further round on his belt,

Closed the

domesday

book,

Fitted his cap back with two hands,

And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger.

His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.Slide14

: "I learned that my local County Derry [childhood] experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to 'the modern world' was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it

.“ Heaney is here referring to the shared experiences of us all at the level of the parish. See Kavanagh’s poem ‘Epic’, and consider Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ set as it is in Dublin on 16

th

June 1906.

Heaney’s work has always been most concerned with the past, even his earliest poems of the 1960sSlide15

A general spirit of

regard

toward the

past (that

is

being able to live with the past and not just ‘in’)helped

Heaney resolve some of his awkwardness about being a writer: he could serve his own community by preserving in literature its customs and crafts, yet simultaneously gain access to a larger community of letters

.

Indeed, Heaney's earliest poetry collections—

Death of a Naturalist

(1966) and

Door into the Dark

(1969)—evoke

a

hard, mainly rural life with rare exactness

, Using

descriptions of rural labourers and their tasks and contemplations of natural phenomena—filtered through childhood and adulthood—Heaney

makes

you see, hear, smell, taste this life, which in his words is not provincial, but parochial; provincialism hints at the minor or the mediocre, but all parishes, rural or urban, are equal as communities of the human

spirit

.

Slide16

As a poet from Northern Ireland, Heaney used his work to reflect upon the "Troubles," the often-violent political struggles that plagued the country during Heaney’s young adulthood. The poet sought to weave the

on going

Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books

Wintering Out

(1973) and

North

(1975

)

.

some reviewers criticized Heaney for being an apologist and mythologizer,

however

the

role of political spokesman has never particularly suited

Heaney.

Slide17

"has written poems directly about the Troubles as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman, someone looked to for comment and

guidance. But

he has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role, defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical, and questioning the extent to which poetry, however 'committed,' can influence the course of history

. Slide18

We should note really carefully that even Heaney's most overtly political poems contain depths that subtly alter their meanings.

Those

who see Seamus Heaney as a symbol of hope in a troubled land are not, of course, wrong to do so

, there is much to commend though

they may be missing much of the undercutting complexities of his poetry, the backwash of ironies which make him as

dark

as he is

bright, it is all too easy to look at the surface and find only what you want.

T

here is much here in common with the work of Swift see especially ‘Gulliver's Travels’ the last two stories, ‘The Tale of a Tub’ and such poems as ‘On a Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed’. Slide19

Heaney’s first work of translation

is the

Irish lyric poem

Buile

Suibhne

.

The work concerns an ancient king who, cursed by the church, is transformed into a mad bird-man and forced to wander in the harsh and inhospitable countryside. Heaney's translation of

this

epic was published as

Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish

(1984)

.

New York Times Book Review

contributor Brendan Kennelly deemed the poem "a balanced statement about a tragically unbalanced mind.

This

bond is extended into Heaney's 1984 volume

Station Island,

where a series of poems titled "Sweeney

Redivivus

" take up Sweeney's voice once more.

The poems reflect one of the book’s larger themes, the connections between personal choices, dramas and losses and larger, more universal forces such as history

, not just

I

rish History but our shared European one, as it is related or told to us and language.

**

Remember that we share a common heritage and culture irrespective of our differences something that is as true of the 6 Counties as elsewhere.Slide20

In The Haw Lantern (1987)

Heaney extends many of these preoccupations and Heaney's focus:—childhood, farm life, politics and culture in Northern Ireland, other poets past and present—Heaney works and ‘forges’ time and again at the taproot of language, examining its genetic structures, trying to discover how it has served, in all its changes, as a culture bearer, a world to contain and explore imaginations, at once a rhetorical weapon and yet something to feed the spirit or soul, the wonderful aesthetic value. He writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with received wisdom, ironically including his own OR how he is

seen and spoken about by others: some trying to claim him as their own.