Misremembering Seamus Heaney

Abstract

This chapter assesses the work of Seamus Heaney, another semiautobiographical poet whose work nevertheless presses on the boundaries of fact. Heaney's poetry often raises the question of whether, or how, remembered experience differs from historical reality. Can memory—and, in particular, memory as revealed through poetry—have a knowledge separate from what happened? Reflecting on conceptions of memory developed by Wordsworth, a poet with whom Heaney identifies on multiple levels but whose poetry he occasionally misremembers, the chapter argues for the necessity of acknowledging mistake even as it pertains to aspects of a remembered life, fictional or not. The act of misremembering emerges as a technique for Heaney—as well as for other poets—to figure the difficulty of mapping the imagination onto a historical world.