Evolution Of Seamus Heaney's Sense Of Place In His Poetry

Seamus Heaney is widely acknowledged as one of the most outstanding poets of the 20th century.He was born in 1939 in a Catholic farmer's family in Northern Ireland.In 1966,he became famous for his first poetry collection Death of a Naturalist.In 1995,he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Heaney's poetry takes daily life as the main material,connects history and today's world with simple and lyrical language,and contains profound ethics.Studies on Heaney at home and abroad have examined Heaney's poems mainly from the perspectives of cultural identity,identity anxiety and post-colonialism to explore his creation motives,to study his dual cultural identities and how Heaney balances the two cultures in his poetry.It is worthy of notice that Heaney is obviously fond of describing "places" in his poems.These places have great impacts on Heaney's poetry creation.They not only inspire him to record the landscape and culture of his hometown in his poetry,but also make him aware of the limitations that places may impose on his imagination.As a multidimensional and complex concept,"sense of place" is used to describe the relationship between people and places.It is based on people's subjective experience of the place,including the characteristics of the place itself,as well as people's feelings to the place.The evolution of Heaney's sense of place embodied in his poems reflects the development of his poetic creation,which is the focus of this thesis.The thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One gives the general information about Heaney as a prolific poet and his twelve poetry collections,recapitulates the literature concerning Heaney's works at home and abroad,and then explains the research objective,method and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two explores the ambivalent senses of place exhibited in Heaney's early poems.Heaney loved the natural landscape and rural life of his hometown from an early age.However,his British education and aspiration to be a poet seemed to conflict with his cultural tradition.Therefore,his place attachment and sense of displacement are both present in his early poems.Chapter Three highlights Heaney's identification with Northern Ireland after his departure.In 1972,Heaney left for Dublin,and the distant point of view caused him to feel increasingly identified with Northern Ireland.He constructs national consciousness through "bog poems" and reterritorializes culture through "place-name poems",which become new ways for him to construct a sense of place.Chapter Four focuses on Heaney's recent poetry where his "global sense of place",which means adapting to the current global-local times and the new emotional and social relationships that arise from it with an open and inclusive attitude,is established.In his recent poetry,Heaney reflects on today's society through history and shifts his focus from regional and political conflicts to the establishment of a poetic world in which different cultures and ideologies can coexist harmoniously.By alluding to classics and establishing intertextuality with the broader literary tradition,Heaney transcends the physical boundaries of poetic creation and breaks through narrow nationalism and localism,thus constructing a global sense of place and reaching a new balance.Chapter Five is the concluding part,which is intended to summarize the whole thesis,reviewing Heaney's evolving sense of place during his poetic career and emphasizing the value of studying Heaney's poetry from the place perspective.Places in Heaney's poetry mean far more than geographical locations.The writing of the place and the evolution of the sense of place show Heaney's exploration from the inside to the outside and from the history to the present world.In this process,the poet manages to reconstruct his complex cultural identity and provides a new writing paradigm for other writers who are also faced with the conflict between realistic responsibility and artistic pursuit.