The sign of the cross

review of the government of the tongue

Thomas Docherty

pp. 147-154

in: Michael B. Allen (ed), Seamus Heaney, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

Seamus Heaney's new collection of critical pieces falls into two sections. The first brings together reviews, articles and lectures concerned with some poets who are more or less close to Heaney's own work: Kavanagh, Larkin, Walcott, all writers who problematise the notion of the poet's (literal) "place", the poet's "Here"-ness, as Larkin might have thought it. This is followed by considerations of a body of work which raises questions of the poet's place in language — poetry in translation — firstly from the Irish and then from the languages of the Eastern bloc. Finally, the second section of the book comprises Heaney's ruminations on "the government of the tongue" in Auden, Lowell and Plath, the substance of his T.S. Eliot memorial lectures.

Cited authors

Heaney Seamus