The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney Essay -- Biogra

The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney To be a poet in a culture obsessed with politics is a dotty business. Investing poetry with the heavy burden of public meaning altogether frustrates its flight however tempting it is to employ ones poetic talent in the service of a program or an ideology, the result usually has small-scale to do with poetry. This is not to condemn the so-called literature of engagement eye-opening and revealing, it has served its exercise in the unfinished story of our century, and now is certainly no age to call for the poets retreat into the ivory tower of the self. Preserving the individual voice amidst the amorphous, all-leveling collective must be the first act of poetic will, a launching board from which each poet must start the effort of poetry. A untainted glance at recent Irish history suffices to show a place where this preservation is particularly difficult. The pressures that the bifurcated Irish society exerts on its poets are enormous taking a political stance is no longer a temptation (this implies a certain luxury of cream on behalf of the tempted) but rather an inescapable reality imposed by the agora of public discourse. Thus the condition of exile becomes the poets only musical mode out, the sole means of retaining the autonomy of his poetic voice. More than merely a survival tactic, however, it is a strategy of finding home elsewhere, whether in the victor language of the island (and todays minority), as in the case of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, or in the larger reality of poetic imagination. Seamus Heaney, who occupies the precarious position of being Irelands nigh famous and accomplished living poet while refusing to become its bard, calls our attention to the section of exi... ...Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. refreshed York Grove Press, 1957. Haviaras, Stratis, ed. Seamus Heaney A Celebration. A Harvard Review Monograph. 1996. Heaney, Seamus. Crediting Poetry The Nobel Lecture. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. ---. The Government of the Tongue Selected Prose 1978-1987. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. ---. Selected Poems 1966-1987. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1995. Malloy, Catharine and Phyllis Carey, ed. Seamus Heaney The defining Spirit. Newark University of Delaware Press, 1996. Said, Edward W. Intellectual Exile Expatriates and Marginals. Grand Street 47 (1993) 113-124. Welch, Robert. Changing States Transformations in Modern Irish Writing. London Routledge, 1993.