The Development of the Poetry of Seamus Heaney From Death of a Naturalist to North

Abstract

Seamus Heaney's poetic development is examined through

a series of close readings of selected poems from his first

four volumes. The main focus of the di3sertation is on the

stages through which he passes in his attempt to develop a

poetic mode which is simultaneously responsive to the preoccupations

of the private self and to the wider political and

cultural backdrop of Northern Ireland.

Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark are examined

in terms of the relation between poetic technique and historical

situation. Correlatives of limitation characterise nearly

all aspects of Heaney's poetic technique in the first volume.

These are enumerated and examined. Enclosures at a conceptual

rather than technical level are found to characterise Door

into the Dark. The mode used threatens to become a form of

self-enclosure, hermetically sealed off from the conditions

of its production.

At the root of the various forms of closure is Heaney's

need to exclude certain material from consideration. History

and the politics of contemporary Northern Ireland are the

most notable phenomena excluded. The poet's inability to

control certain intractable potentialities latent in his subject

matter is examined in poems which deal with violence, history,

the unknown and landscape. These poems, generally considered

failures by critics, are shown to facilitate Heaney's poetic

development.

In an investigation of two sets of landscape poems in

Door into the Dark, those which treat landscape as a surface

phenomenon, and those which see it masking depths which Heaney

has constituted as realms of significance, I examine the means

whereby he begins to move toward "the matter of Ireland" through

his contemplation of landscape as the memory-bank of Ireland's

history.

In Wintering Out Heaney develops an elaborate set of

conceits in which he collapses the distinctions between various

parts of his poetic terrain (landscape, language, the body,

sexuality, violence, etc.). He blurs the distinctions between

the self and an external environment which absorbs and preserves

its history. The aim of these strategies is to enable him

to generate a speech which is simultaneously both personal

and socially symbolic. The complexity and ingenuity of the

strategy is investigated and the reasons for its failure outlined.

Heaney's estrangement, and his relations to his varied

linguistic, literary and political traditions are also surveyed.

The dialectical tension between the poet's contradictory

needs to engage with politics and to remain detached from

them is then examined. Among the topics in North which are

considered are the bipartite structure of the volume, Heaney's

use and eventual rejection of myth, the narrativization of

part I, and the problems facing a poetry which takes violence

as its subject. The poet's self-consciousness and his reflexive

concern with his own poetry are found to be features which

contribute to the success of the volume.

The dissertation concludes with a consideration of how

Heaney manages paradoxically to turn a failure--his failure

to produce a politically efficacious speech--into a form of

poetic success by making that failure his subject.