VERSIONS OF IRISH PASTORAL POETRY: W.B. YEATS AND SEAMUS HEANEY
VERSIONS OF IRISH PASTORAL POETRY: W.B. YEATS AND SEAMUS HEANEY

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims at presenting Yeats and Heaney as poets that inherited and continued the Irish pastoral literary tradition. Irish literature has shown its preoccupation with place and nature since its creation of the ancient dinshenchas, i.e. place-name poetry, expressing the lore of the place. The Irish pastoral tradition has been fruitfully interwoven with the classical and the English one. Moreover, a nostalgic mood/mode, typical of the pastoral tradition, has been a prominent characteristic of a people who has always sought the means to bridge the past and the present, to recover the past and heal the traumas of disruptions and emigration. Yeats’s pastoral verse may have grown out of the need to create a self-consciously nationalist literature, as an attempt to continue previous models, in a context of the occult. Heaney’s pastoral poetry has emerged in post-colonial Ireland, during a period of violence and chaos, in an “in-between” space. His early metaphors (the bog, the digger) and his representations of the Irish landscape, as feminine or as “the other”, endeavor to establish or, at least, question, spatial, historical and cultural continuity.

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