Abstract
‘Soon people are going to start comparing him to Yeats’, wrote Clive James of Seamus Heaney, a cunningly self-fulfilling prophecy. Actually Heaney has about as much in common with Yeats as he has with Longfellow, but he is, you see, Irish, and what more obvious to compare one Irishman to than another? Isn’t there something unwittingly racist about this way of thinking? Why should a Southern Protestant pseudo-Ascendency crypto-fascist who died in 1939 be presumed to be comparable to a contemporary Northern Catholic of peasant stock, just because of the abstract fact of their shared Irishness?
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Note
Frank Ormsby, Poets from the North of Ireland (Belfast, 1979), p. 8. The latter part of Eagleton’s review, which discusses this book, has been omitted here. [Ed.]
Jon Silkin, ‘Bedding the Locale’, New Blackfriars (March 1973), pp. 130–3.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Eagleton, T. (1997). Review of Field Work. In: Allen, M. (eds) Seamus Heaney. New Casebooks. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10682-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10682-0_8
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