‘Pap for the Dispossessed’: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity

Abstract

The centrality of the question of identity to Irish writing and critical discussion of it since the nineteenth century is not due simply to the contingent influence of political preoccupations. Rather, it indicates the crucial function performed by literature in the articulation of those preoccupations, inasmuch as literary culture is conceived as offering not merely a path towards the resolution, but the resolution itself of the problems of subjective and political identity. At present, the Irish poet whose work has most evidently gained such authority is Seamus Heaney, the dust-jackets of whose volumes of poetry since Field Work carry such banal assertions as ‘Everyone knows by now that Heaney is a major poet…’² Heaney’s quasi-institutional acceptance on both sides of theAtlantic as a major poet and bearer of the tradition coincides with a tendency to regard his work as articulating important intuitions of Irish identity, and as uttering and reclaiming that identity beyond the divisive label, ‘Anglo-Irishness’. Therefore, it is not untimely to interrogate these assumptions in the context of an historical elaboration of the principal concepts which founded and still dominate literary and political formulations of Irish identity.

I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language… A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination’s supply lines to the past… to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened — all this is signified by their language.

(Seamus Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’, Preoccupations, p. 150)

Seamus Heaney, ‘Hercules and Antaeus’, North (London, 1975), p. 53.