The Figuring of W.B.Yeats in Seamus Heaney’ Poems and Prose

Abstract

Abstract

been a constant presence in Heaney’s criticism since the late 1970s, and a central figure in his consideration of poetic influence. Auden, in his elegy for Yeats on his death in 1939, famously said that ‘The Poet became his admirers.’ [1] One of the admirers Yeats has most crucially become is Seamus Heaney. The strenuousness of Heaney’s ongoing engagement with Yeats is of keen interest not least because it sets him in the midst of one of the most fraught and contentious debates in recent Irish literary and cultural criticism, in which the voice of Seamus Deane has been particularly penetrating, with its articulation of Yeats’s later career as an exercise in ‘the pathology of literary Unionism’, and with its inveighing against a criticism complaisantly tolerant of certain presumptively Yeatsian procedures in contemporary Northern Irish poetry which appear to propose that ‘The literature - autonomous, ordered - stands over against the political system in its savage disorder.’ But it is of keen interest also because Heaney’s place in Irish national life is of a kind that no Irish poet since Yeats has enjoyed, or endured. The relationship between Heaney and Yeats which this paper is going to discuss here is an affair of peculiar delicacy, in which the bold but wary subtleties of Heaney’s negotiations over the years may have been almost matched by the subtleties of suspicious scrutiny to which they have been subjected. It will, however, also explore the way Yeats figures in Heaney’s poems as well as in his critical prose.