To Imagine and To Inhabit: Ireland seen through Yeats and Heaney

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the shift in poetic authority from W.B. Yeats to Seamus Heaney through a comparative close reading of four poems: Yeats’s “To Ireland in the Coming Times” (1892) and “Easter, 1916” (1916), and Heaney’s “Digging” (1964) and “From the Frontier of Writing” (1985). Both poets are canonical figures in the Irish literary tradition, yet their positions within Irish history differ. Yeats was an Anglo-Protestant from Dublin, and Heaney was a Catholic from Northern Ireland. The thesis argues that this difference in positioning produces a structural difference in poetic authority. Drawing on postcolonial theory, mainly the work of Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, the impact of their colonial history is read alongside broader theories of culture and identity by Declan Kiberd, Benedict Anderson, and Stephen Greenblatt. Yeats locates his authority in myth and cultural nationalism, whilst Heaney locates his in bodily memory and lived political experience. What is gained in the shift from Yeats to Heaney is the truth about modern Irish identity, but what is lost is the dream of a Romantic Ireland.