Mining Call - Seamus Heaney, Irish Culture To Explore And Self-regression

An Irish writer will always be supposed to carry up certain social and political bears, and it is the same for the 1995 Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney as well. The complication of Heaney's culture identity makes the understanding of his poems tough, which will not be enough to be seen from the aspect of his art alone. His early poems seeks to define the position of Irish culture under the British control and the multiculture enviroment. He explored the most original Irish ground and rural life, where his father and ancesters living and working on, trying to make his own voice on Irish culture. Later after, he came to realize that the Irish culture could not be the pure, old and traditional Irishness anymore. The boundary between cultures could not get an easy cut. The poet showed more concern on the inward thinking, and tried to make his poems more individual and creative. In this easy, based on the Irish poet Seamus Heaney's poetry, and the theory on identity, it will firstly analyze the exploration and discovery of Heaney about Irish culture, what he kept thinking about and defining it. The second part will try to find out Heaney's choice and answers about his own identity upon his dual-role of Irish-British.Heaney's unique way of exploring Irish culture, his concern on everyday miracles well-revealed the Irish culture, the symbols and metaphors he found to show Irishness, his unique perspectives on bogs and the irish history it stored...all make him quite different from the former cultural Renaissance poets. However, in his later works, Heaney goes far to find in which direction should him go between social responsibility and the independent voice of an artist. "Irish poets" is a good starting point of discovering the characteristic of Heaney's poem, but "Irishness" could not cover all merits of the poet, his unique artistic perception, his unusual vision seeing things, his concern on the independence for poetry among politics and public, his fascination on the escaper, terrible beauties, as well as his rebellion to traditions while exploring them have made his poems on one hand Irish-landed, on the other hand, fresh, unusual, and irreplacable, which shows the poet an outlet of his spirit.