Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited

2022

The book titled Station Island, Seamus Heaney’s seventh collection of poetry published in 1984, is divided into three separate parts. The central section, which we are going to consider in this paper, gives the title to the whole collection of poems, and is set on a small rocky isle of Lough Derg, in County Donegal. Station Island – also known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory because, according to a tradition, St. Patrick was the first to establish the penitential ritual – has long been a place of pilgrimage for Irish Catholics. Heaney’s long poem is divided into twelve sections – as the penitential stations of the religious pilgrimage – and is a sort of fictional pilgrimage which the poet undertakes. A sequence of imagined encounters with ghosts from his personal past, shadows that emerge from his own dream-life and from Ireland’s historical roots. The aim of this short essay is to analyse how the ghosts that accompany the poet in his journey are described and characterised. Eventually, we are going to highlight the connections between Station Island and another literary work that has been both an example and an encouragement for Heaney: Dante’s Divina Commedia.

2010

This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley’s two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley’s agonized positioning as Ireland’s ‘guest/foreigner/son’ was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with ‘the Ireland within’ or without. The paper suggests that the poet’s slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the for...

2012

The 1798 Irish rebellion together with the preceding decade is justly regarded as a watershed event in the forming of Irish national identity. Therefore it is not surprising that it has inspired numerous, and often conflicting, interpretations in both historiography and literature. This study concentrates on both English- and Irish-language historical novels and plays written about the rebellion in the course of the twentieth century, especially after the year 1916. Attention is drawn to the interpretations of the event contained in these literary works, comparing them to the various views of 1798 as they have evolved in Irish historiography. As the rebellion, especially from the 1970s onward, has been increasingly seen in the light of the later conflict in Northern Ireland, this connection has an important place in the analysis. On the theoretical level, the thesis draws from the findings of Hayden White, who has famously questioned the border between historiographical and fictiona...

New Hibernia Review, 2019

2021

This article addresses how the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles enters into a dialogue with the memory of World War II. Poems by Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Sinéad Morrissey are analysed, showing how World War II is a controversial source of comparison for these poets. While World War II provides important ways of framing the suffering and claustrophobia of the Northern Irish conflict, evident differences also mean that such comparisons are handled warily and with some irony. The poems are highly self-conscious utterances that seek to unsettle and develop generic strategies in the light of traumatic suffering. This essay draws on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, and it also makes use of Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory in order to highlight how Seamus Heaney in particular makes use of the World War II memories mediated by popular culture to respond to the Troubles.

Seamus Heaney’s development, as I will argue in this study, parallels that of the Irish psyche over the past fifty years. Heaney has progressed in terms of his thinking from a relatively simplistic and conventional perspective into a far more cosmopolitan and complex view of his own identity. His developing writing, encompassing, as it does, influences from different cultures, languages and texts, enacts a movement from “prying into roots” and “fingering slime” to an embrace of different aspects of European and world culture which has strong parallels with the development of Ireland itself. I will be examining how Heaney progressed from a personal vision of digging into his familial past to a more Jungian view of digging into the historical consciousness of his psyche. However, I will also be suggesting that to see North in particular, and Heaney’s writing in general, as in any way a simplistic account of a nationalistic outlook is to misread them completely. I will argue that these books adopt a far more complex attitude to issues of nationalism, Catholicism and Irishness. From being a backward, inward-looking country, obsessed with the past and with a sense of inferiority, Ireland has begun, in the words of Robert Emmet, to take her place among the nations of the earth. By this, I do not just mean in economic terms, as evidenced by the much lauded Celtic Tiger phenomenon. I also mean in cultural, social and intellectual terms, as we become more confident of our place in Europe, and of our position as a bridge between Europe and America. Because the thrust of my argument suggests a parallel between the development of Heaney’s own thought and the developing sense of self-consciousness and sophistication of contemporary Ireland, my approach will be broadly chronological, grouping different works into different stages of development. While such a procedure is necessarily arbitrary, nevertheless I feel that there is an internal coherence in the groups of texts which I have chosen.

One Day, Seamus Heaney, 2017

This study is about how Heaney responds to the Troubles in Northern Ireland in his poetry and argues that Heaney is a poet who deals with the Troubles in his poetry to provide a clearer picture of his contemporary society rather than to promote any ideology. Therefore, this chapter will focus on the aspect of listening in Heaney’s Troubles poetry.

The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, 2017

The long nineteenth century saw the formation of modern Irish memory, although the nature of its novelty is open to debate, as it maintained a continuous dialogue with its traditional roots. A preliminary period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century has been identified by Joep Leerssen – following the German school of history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) pioneered by Reinhart Koselleck – as a Sattelzeit, which accommodated the Anglicisation and modernisation of what had formerly been a predominantly Gaelic society. In particular, antiquarian fascination with the distant past played a key role in re-adapting native bodies of knowledge for Anglo-Irish readerships, whether in the music collecting of Edward Bunting, the song translations of Charlotte Brooke or the writings of Samuel Ferguson, to name but a few. This concept of cultural transition is useful for understanding the changes in memorial practices, which came about through reinvention, rather than simple invention and imposition from above, of Irish traditions. A record of remembrance in the countryside at the time of the transformation was captured between 1824 and 1842 by the Ordnance Survey, which, under the supervision of the noted antiquarian George Petrie, sent out fieldworkers, among them the illustrious Gaelic scholars John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry, to compile detailed memoirs of local customs, originally designed as supplements for the topographical maps. Characteristically, the agents of change also engaged in documentation and preservation of traditional memory. Whereas the loss of Irish language has been poignantly decried by Alan Titley as ‘the Great Forgetting’, the modernisation of Ireland was not a straightforward linear progression from a largely Irish-speaking traditional culture, steeped in memory, to an English-speaking capitalist society, supposedly clouded by amnesia. It should be acknowledged that the Irish language maintained a substantial presence well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, during the cultural revival of the fin de siècle, language enthusiasts such as Douglas Hyde collected folk traditions in Irish in order to make them available as a resource for a modern national society. Overall, the increase in literacy in English did not necessarily eradicate oral traditions. Examination of popular print reveals that it functioned as a vehicle for reworking memories, which then fed back into oral culture.