16 Poetry, Language, and Identity: A Note on Seamus Heaney

Abstract

Irish literature has frequently been subject to the pressures of cu tural stereotyping. Particularly a road, but also in Ireland itself, one is often led to believe that a typically 'Irish' work is one where one or more of the following stock motifs are to be found the idealization of the past, the lure of a primitive landscape, the compelling power of violence and its almost mystical rapport with feminine sexuality and Catholic spirituality, and finally an aboriginal fidelity to motherland, tribe, nation, community and family. Phrased in more extreme and less kind terms, the caricatural attitude to Irish culture is one which expects to find a 'land of Popes and Pigs and Bogs and Booze' (to quote the racist verse of Stuart Howard-Jones on the Irish, inexcusably selected by Kingsley Amis for The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, 1978 and, one might add, of 'poetry. As the colonial portrait goes, though the Irish are irresponsible, insalubrious and irrational 'Celts, they are at least, at their quaintest and most harmless, poetic 'dreamers of dreams'. It's about time we put a final full stop to such anachronistic stereotypes and reclaimed our modern poets for modernity.