The Poetics of Memory – The Public Role of Seamus Heaney after 1995

Abstract

This thesis deals with what it means to be a ‘public’ poet in national and transnational contexts. Because Seamus Heaney’s ‘Irishness’ has shaped the critical response to his work, what has been effaced is detailed critical attention to the interplay between the national and transnational dimensions of his poetry. What is most evident in his later work is a type of border-crossing transcultural solidarity, and an openness to alternate views and other cultures becomes increasingly important. To speak of Heaney’s cosmopolitanism is not to dismiss the significance of the national, but to indicate multiple allegiances and identifications. In addition to considering Heaney as a cosmopolitan poet, this thesis uses approaches and concepts from memory studies to draw out the significance of Heaney’s work in a transnational literary space. While critics have long asserted the importance of memory in his poetry, it has most often been treated as a peripheral rather than central idea. While some criticism obliquely deals with collective or cultural memory in his work – for example by discussing the representation of myth or tradition in his bog poems – there has been little sustained attention to this aspect of his work. This project is focused on how public memory is shaped in collections and major translations published after 1995. Memory is a helpful lens to look at Heaney’s late work, in particular, because of the importance of the interplay of past, present and future in these works. In his later work the dynamic plays out in interesting ways: in the construction of a collective memory of the Troubles in works written in the 1990s; in the use of the elegy to commemorate the passing of important contemporary poets; in his writing on events with transnational significance, such as 9/11; and in the slippages between past and present in poems about his family. Another way that Heaney explores memory is through the literary afterlives of texts – specifically, his appropriation of canonical classical texts. His adaptations of Sophocles, Horace and Virgil collapse the distinctions between past, present and future. In his late work Heaney actively shapes collective memory through a pattern of reprising and revising imagery and ideas from his earlier work and through the translation and adaptation of texts from classical antiquity. The thesis concludes with a coda which examines the commemorative practices which have emerged since his death in 2013 and, particularly, how an individual can function as a site of memory. Show more