Paradigms of possibility

Seamus Heaney

Richard Kirkland

pp. 252-266

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

Abstract

Seamus Heaney's journey through two frontier check points presents a readily identifiable parable of the literary self-conscious; a parable which poetry from Northern Ireland has had recourse to many times. In "From the Frontier of Writing", the journey from doubt, through confrontation, to a visionary state of artistic confidence is one which offers a paradigm of poetic development which Heaney has located in the work of Patrick Kavanagh² and which also, microcosmically, images Heaney's own poetic career from North through Station Island, and into the future tense with Seeing Things.³ The final state of achievement is one dependent on the 'squawk of clearance" granted by literary criticism, an examination which leaves him "a little emptier" ("as always") but to which he is equal. While such a reading may seem to portray Heaney's poetic manoeuvres as slightly pat, I would rather emphasise the liberation through cynicism that "From the Frontier of Writing" proffers; an interpretation which allows the poem a prefigurative quality beyond the ineffable world of the transcendent or prophetic.

Cited authors

Heaney Seamus