Abstract
In his early autobiographical essay, ‘Mossbawn’, Heaney lays claim to ‘natural’ or ‘original’ or autochthonous identity with the land:
I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door.1
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Notes
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose (London: Faber, 1980), p. 17.
Seamus Heaney, interview with Henri Cole, Paris Review 39, 144 (1997), 117.
See Jamie L. Olson, Rooted Cosmopolitanism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky (Ann Arbor, MI: Proquest, UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2011).
Seamus Heaney, ‘An Open Letter’ (Derry: Field Day Theatre Pamphlets, 1983).
Seamus Heaney, ‘Kinship’, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 123–4.
Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 2008), p. 267.
Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber, 1966), p. 43.
Seamus Heaney interview with Rand Brandes, in Salmagundi 80 (Fall 1988), 4–21 (5). Online: <http://www.enotes.com/seamus-heaney-essays/heaney-seamus/seamus-heaney-with-ra>.
Quoted in Carol Tell, Part-Time Exiles: Contemporary Irish Poets and their Migrations (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 2004), p. 42.
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Redress of Poetry’, in The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber, 1995), pp. 4–5.
Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 182.
Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (London: Faber, 1992), p. 6
Harold Bloom, ‘The Freshness of Transformation: Emerson’s Dialectics of Influence’, in David Levin (ed.), Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 142.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 65.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry’, Critical Inquiry 7:4 (Summer 1981), p. 646.
G. B. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 81.
Walt Whitman, ‘Old Ireland’, in Daniel Tobin (ed.), The Book of Irish American Poetry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2007), p. 35.
See also Ciaran Carson’s critique of Heaney’s mythologizing procedures in ‘“Escaped from the Massacre?”’, The Honest Ulsterman 50 (Winter 1975), 183–6.
Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 41.
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Flight Path’, in The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), pp. 22–6.
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Bookcase’, in Electric Light (London: Faber, 2001), p. 51.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Anything Can Happen’ (essay), in Anything Can Happen: a Poem and Essay with Translations in Support of Art for Amnesty (Dublin: Townhouse, 2005), p. 19.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Anything Can Happen’, in District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), p. 13.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Canopy’, in Human Chain (London: Faber, 2010), p. 44.
Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: the 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber, 1988), p. 230.
Derek Walcott, Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 59.
Derek Walcott, ‘Leaving School’ (1965), in Robert D. Hamner (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1993), p. 32.
Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948–1984 (London: Faber, 1992), p. 5.
Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 50.
Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: a Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (London: Faber, 1990), p. 77.
Seamus Heaney, quoted in Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: the Making of the Poet (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993), pp. 56–7.
John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber, 1981), p. 62.
Theodore Roethke, ‘Cuttings’, in Theodore Roethke: Collected Poems (New York: Anchor Books, 1975), p. 35.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Cauled’, in Stations (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975), p. 4.
Robert Frost, ‘For Once, Then, Something’, in Ian Hamilton (ed.), Robert Frost: Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 130.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Above the Brim’, in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost (London: Faber, 1997), p. 73.
Seamus Heaney, ‘A Basket of Chestnuts’, in Seeing Things (London: Faber, 1991), p. 24.
Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: a Critical Study (London: Faber, 1998) p. 127.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Elegy’, in Field Work (London: Faber, 1979), p. 31–2.
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© 2014 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews
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Kennedy-Andrews, E. (2014). Seamus Heaney: ‘the Appetites of Gravity’. In: Northern Irish Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330390_3
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