irish heaney
TRANSCRIPT
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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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Heaney accused of the use of genderstereotypes
gendered fetishization, and the deploymentof male gaze which objectivizes anditemizes women as Other
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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.