ENGL 495 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Tumbrel, Gargling, Enjambment
4 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
28 March, 2018
Heaney
- World poet -- not just known for his poetry around the world, but also draws inspiration
from around the world, lots of traffic
- The way Irish literature has become postcolonial, the way Irish literature has
become its own distinction -- Heaney becomes post figure for postcolonial
identity
- Ireland exports poets, writers abroad; Heaney was a migratory poet (taught at
Harvard, back and forth between Dublin and Massachusetts)
- Grew up on a farm, right on the border between Northern Ireland and Irish Republic; the
farm was in Northern Ireland
- Catholic Irish writer, only Catholic of the four Irish Nobel Prize winners
- Factors into sectarian violence
- Taught for a while; influence of other poets may have come from there
- Deeply indebted to patrick kavanaugh (valuizing parochial, agrarian themes)
- Eclectic tastes; did some translating (Beowulf, Odyssey, Aeneid)
- Because he became so famous, he kind of fled; how do you avoid people asking you for
things -- spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe, got to know their literature
- Mandelstarn, Milosz, Brodsky were influences, Heaney translated Polish poems
- Heaney Astray = translation of poem in Gaelic
- Heaney as a translator
- In touch with American, Eastern European writing, classics like Dante and Vergil,
Kavanaugh -- eclectic mix of influences
- Irish poets finding a niche in elite private universities in America, giving visibility to Irish
poets more recently
- Heaney did maintain a residence in Dublin
- Grew up on the border, felt guilty about leaving Northern Ireland to move to Dublin, saw
it as flight to leave sectarian violence
- Keeping Going is partly about that
- Reconciling global and local was a different problem for Heaney than for
Kavanaugh; Heaney comes out on side of cosmopolitan, but with an emphasis
on how to maintain ties to the local
Death of a Naturalist
- Expects an elegy -- passing of a childhood phase, of a person; poem is not that
- Poem begins with rot -- letting flax rot in order to make linen, Heaney’s family worked in
a linen mill
- Decomposition as a way of composing; letting flax rot in order to make cloth
- Not just process of decomposition and recomposition, but also a process of
refinement, plant becomes piece of clothing
- Meter is roughly iambic pentameter, kind of Miltonic and epic -- larger forces are at work
in this poem
