From "Live Between" To "Live Beyond"

Seamus Heaney is the most prominent Irish poet since Yeats. Starting his poetic career in 1960s, Heaney has published over ten volumes of poetry, prose, along with many translation works. His poems, with simple style and choice language, have aroused interest of many people and become very popular since their publications. As Heaney has lived long in Northern Ireland and experienced the most critical days, his poems have been heavily imbued with a strong sense of times and pining for an identity due to his own ethnic and religious entanglement.The present thesis studies the progress of Irish poet Seamus Heaney's search for identity from 1960s to the end of the 20th century. For any individual in modern society, identity is multivariate and unstable. The sense of identity comes from a sense of cultural continuity or discontinuity. This well-accepted notion of identity proffers a good perspective to the study of identity of Heaney, enabling us to understand Heaney's poems from a better point of view. Having witnessed and experienced the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Heaney put his life into his works and presented the readers pieces of autobiographical poems. Therefore, Heaney's process of poetic creation is his pilgrimage to the search for his identity. The thesis is intended to set up this framework and to point out that Heaney's identity is evolving from"live between"to"live beyond".The thesis falls into three major parts in accordance with Heaney's three poetic creative phases. Chapter two focuses on the poet's first poetic phase, when he is mainly telling his child-self and when he just begins to turn the world into word. Heaney's sense of identity faces challenges for the first time during this phase since Heaney betrays his family farming tradition by picking up a pen in his hand as his"digging"tool. Troubled by these different, even conflicting traditions, Heaney's sense of living"between"starts. Chapter three examines Heaney's wrestling between his inner world and the outer world to forge a national sense and personal identity, and finally his finding the way out. During this phase, with the worsening Northern Irish situation, Heaney feels great pressure as a poet and the sense of"live between"grows stronger, impelling him to find a way to forge a national identity. The bog poems helps Heaney find the connection between the Irish past and present and set up a cultural continuity, though they does not solve his problem of identity. With the desire to come to terms with his artistic pursuit as a poet and the social responsibility as a citizen, Heaney finds himself in need of a"door into the light". Chapter four focuses on Heaney's transcendence from the constraints of nationhood, cultures and traditions, and his final fulfillment of creative freedom. Through a long and hard pilgrimage of search for identity, Heaney has got away with a sense of dividedness, and turned from"live between"to"live beyond".A study of Seamus Heaney's search for identity not only helps us appreciate his poems, but also enables us to understand the significance of the research of identity for Irish men of letters, and even the ordinary people in the modern society.