Seamus Heaney

from revivalism to postmodernism

Alistair Davies

pp. 103-117

in: Gary Day, Brian Docherty (eds), British poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

In one of the most important and wide-ranging of recent essays on Seamus Heaney, the fish philosopher, cultural historian and literary critic Richard Kearney, who writes with the added authority of a working association with Heaney, describes what he takes to be the dominant reading of him.¹ "Heaney's primary inspiration, we are told, is one of place his quintessentially Irish vocation, the sacramental naming of a homeland. Hence the preoccupation with images of mythology, archaeology and genealogy, of returning to forgotten origins."² It is a reading which Kearney sets out to challenge and he does so, in a vocabulary derived from the hermeneutic philosophy of Martin Heidegger, because he believes that it not only misrepresents Heaney's work but also obscures the significance of his achievement for contemporary Irish culture. We can grasp the intended scope of Kearney's revisionary account if we give due weight to the following distinction, for he asks us to reconsider Heaney's work in a radically new perspective and, at the same time, to shift even more radically the grounds upon which we choose to assent to that work. Following from its Heideggerean presuppositions, this involves less a rereading than the owning up to new possibilities of individual and collective existence.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Kearney Richard

Heaney Seamus