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   kc4u Teacher
   College - Senior

   eNotes Editor

   Seamus Heaney's poetry, I think, is a splendid combination of Romantic nature-consciousness, Wordsworthian memory, Blake-like simplicity and Hughes-like insight into the natural under-taste of violence. Heaney is both a participant as well as a resistant voice in relation to what we have come to call the post-modern age. His poetry is a return to the simple and pure natural topos with a strong accent on his geopolitical space--Ireland in its bogs and marshes where the historical underbellies of genocide often open up. A devout classical scholar and a Dantean at heart, Heaney's poetry combines the antiquity and the postmodern. While his language and conceptual/thematic ambit remains quasi-classical, his poetry has a strongly spatial vortex which the likes of Brian McHale may well relate to the importance of space in Postmodernism as an analogue to what time was to the moderns. But, on the other hand, Heaney's poetry is steeped into mother nature. The poet is a digger and poetry is 'field-work'. His work exploits the Gaelic music of the Irish tongue, participates in a curious quest for the fragmented post-colonial Irish identity, reverts the historical meta-narratives by focalizing the micro-histories. His Green Poetry, which sees the vocation of poetry as a natural extension of the farmer, redefines the pastoral, in the postmodern world of urbanity. His poetry reminds us that the values projected and upheld by postmodernism as a subversion of priorly privileged set of values, is also subject to an allegation of establishing a newer status-quo.

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   Posted by kc4u on Monday October 19, 2009 at 11:19 AM