Mainland Hellas: Seamus Heaney’s Peloponnese and Delphi

Abstract

This chapter documents Heaney’s travels to the Peloponnese and Delphi in 1995–2004, aligning him mainly with the pastoral mode and the philhellenic Grand Tour focused on antiquity. The core of the analysis is taken by “Sonnets from Hellas” and their earlier versions, as well as the “Greek Experience” speech (2004) published in Greek in Greece. The material is interspersed with interviews with Heaney, including those published in Greece and evincing his familiarity with modern Greek history. The chapter also ponders on the latinisation and occasional hibernicisation of the Greek material in Heaney’s oeuvre. While mediated by mythology and two models of literary engagement with Greece, Zbigniew Herbert and Robert Fitzgerald, Heaney’s sonnets also point to Irish and Greek postcolonial contexts.