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

The Importance of Exile in the numbers of Seamus Heaney To be a poet in a culture obsessed with politics is a risky business. Investing poetry with the heavy burden of public importation whole frustrates its flight however tempting it is to employ ones poetic giving in the service of a program or an ideology, the result ordinarily has little to do with poetry. This is not to condemn the so-called literature of meshing eye-opening and revealing, it has served its purpose in the unfinished story of our century, and now is certainly no time to call for the poets retreat into the ivory tower of the self. Preserving the individual joint 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 mere glance at recent Irish history suffices to visual aspect a place where this preservation is particularly difficult. The pressures that the bifurcated Irish parliamentary law exerts on its poets are enormous taking a political military posture is no longer a temptation (this implies a certain opulence of choice on behalf of the tempted) but rather an inescapable reality compel by the agora of public discourse. Thus the condition of exile becomes the poets only way out, the sole means of retaining the autonomy of his poetic voice. More than just now a survival tactic, however, it is a strategy of finding home elsewhere, whether in the original 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 world Irelands most famous and accomplished living poet while refusing to become its bard, calls our heed to the role of exi... ...Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New 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 Farra r, 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 upstart Nation. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1995. Malloy, Catharine and Phyllis Carey, ed. Seamus Heaney The Shaping 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.