Outfacing history: the artistic influences of W. B. Yeats and others on Seamus Heaney's Noughties poetry

This dissertation focusses on Seamus Heaney’s last three major collections of poetry, Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010). The main political, historical, and personal contexts of these collections are as follows: for Electric Light, the Northern Irish Peace Process, and the Celtic Tiger economic boom in the Republic of Ireland, for District and Circle, 9/11 and the War on Terror are the milieux that Heaney is responding to, and in Human Chain, personal mortality is the most immediate concern for the aging Heaney. In light of these collections, the artistic influences of W.B. Yeats are discussed, in particular Yeatsian intransigence and the idea of art as conducive to civilisation, Yeats’s dialecticism, and the latter’s attitude towards art and personal mortality. These ideas assist Heaney in finding a way to write as a public poet under intense political pressure, and feed into his own conceptions of poetry, such as the field of force. From the Troubles onwards, Yeats is Heaney’s primary artistic influence. In addition, Heaney engages with a number of other literary figures in his career as poet and critic, such as Virgil, Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Patrick Kavanagh, and Philip Larkin. As they appear in the collections examined, the impact of these figures on the central Heaney–Yeats relationship is also discussed. These poets are ultimately useful for Heaney in answering his central artistic questions of how a poet should properly live and write, and what his relationship is to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Wortley, Alexander

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/qf00-4d28

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:e00575e0-5e5d-43f2-907a-e22055c59c78:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1