Heaney as a Modern Poet

Seams Haney as a poet of Modern Ireland Seams Haney epitomizes the dilemma of the modern-day poet. In his assemblage of essays Preoccupations he embarks on a search for answers to some fundamental questions regarding a poet How should a poet live and write? What Is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his modern earthly concern? In Preoccupations Haney imagines Digging itself as having been dug up, quite a than written, observing that he has come to realize that It was laid down in me years ago.In this smell, the poetic act is one of retrieval-of recovering something that already exists-rather than of creating something altogether new from whole cloth, Plagued by the moral dilemma of sympathizing with the school of public opinion that wanted to destroy the Protestant supremacy, and being a poet, he could not condone violence. This dilemma tore him apart and gave way to a sense of fragmented Identity and an Inevitable nihilism. It Is this sense of the repetition of cycles root thick-skulled in the past that attracted Haney to Globs book on The mire People.What Glob offers is an cooking stove off pre-Christian, northern European tribal society in which rite violence is a necessary part of the structure of look. Most of the Iron-Age bodies recover from the Jutland bogs and documented by Glob had been the victims of ritual killings, many of them having served as human sacrifices to the Earth Goddess Nervous. Haney detected a kinship between the heathen civilizations of Jutland and Irelands own Celtic traditions.Haney in a conversation affirms Irish Catholicism is continuous with something older than Christianity. Honeys first extended attempt at conflating his understanding of Globs Jutland rituals with his own sense of mythic and modern autobiography comes in the Tolland Man. The Tolland Man is one of the recovered bodies by Glob in this book. He was a victim sacrificed to Nervous, In the hope of securing a solid crop from the land, and It Is In this sense that he is, as Haney describes him as groom to the goddess.Haney imagines the killing of the Tolland Man and his subsequent burial in the Bog as a kind of violent love making between victim and goddess, In which Nervous , opening her fen reserves the victims body by immersing it in her sexual dark juices. When the Tolland Man is dug up, many centuries later the bugger cutters discover His last gruel of winter seed/caked In his stomach. Ever since Haney dictated as a child In a moss- hole, Haney realized that the Bog re designateed for him a repository of memories of his childhood. He also recognized the Bog as being literally a storage place which held objects bear on for decades beneath It.Just as Haney believed that Irelands taradiddle lay beneath the Bog he also began to use the Bog to project her future. The fact that poetry is a kind of continuous and complex stream of thoughts, a composite of memories In which what we ha ve fetchd in the past Is constantly merging with our experience of the moment best embodied by Eliots Time present and time past/argon both perhaps present in time future/and time future contained in time past. Haynes poesys are laced with a strong sense of alienation In the modern world and the need to negotiate the distance between origins and present circumstances.In the poem Digging learning and the privileges to which it provides access are what operates the speaker trot his tamer. The speaker sits interior looking out at his father forming beneath his window. If he cannot literally dig, he can dig metaphorically unearthing the detail of the life of his family and community and honoring them by preserving them in his verse. As Hellene Vender puts it, these earliest poems memorial a life which the poet does not want to follow, could not follow, moreover none the less recognizes as forever a part of his privileged landscape.The language evokes a strong sense of the sight a nd sound of the world being described which indicates the early influence on Haney of this near contemporary English poet Ted Hughes. Language is thus deployed here with enormous precision in the impressionistic manner in order to evoke a small image of a very specific world with Haney describing it as the snarf of language itself. In the true modernist vein Haney takes a descent into his past which belongs analogous to his subconscious, digging out memories. The land of Ireland itself is, the object of resentment for those who endured the terrible low of the Great Hunger.In Ata Potato Digging the ultra collective of a mountain hungering from birth takes on a political dimension as well as a purely descriptive one. The degradation of having to grub like plants makes the deal seem worth no more than weeds so it is unsurprising that they should feel that their land is the bitchy earth. Honeys subject matter and imagery become stark and astringent filled with death and dying and rooted firm in his world. However, the irony becomes evident when the essence of profligacy is contrasted with famine victim could afford to throw away tea dregs or crusts.As the workers stretchiness out in their rest they are describes lying on unfaithful ground. This reminds us of the fact that nature can set its face against existence and behave in an unpredictable manner. It can also be argued that although Honeys work is full of images of death and dying, it is at the same time deeply rooted in life endlessly metaphorical. It holds out an offer of endlessness of cynical history of eternity. Honeys poems are ultimately peace poems intensifying the sense of beauty in contrast to the horror of violence and the pathos of needless death.