From Mossbawn to Station Island: A sense of place in Seamus Heaney's poetry

Place in Seamus Heaney's poetry signifies more than sentimentally revisited geographical locations. It serves as a vital stimulant for the developing imagination and represents cultural influences through which Heaney sifts to understand the social authority of poetry. The poetry is strengthened by places at which he uncovers traces of his heritage, satisfying a need to belong, to reconnect the artist's identity with home so as to reconfirm origins and stabilize the artist within familiar territory.; Heaney nevertheless becomes wary of the control that place can impose upon the imagination; the sustenance of place cannot hold, and may never have held. Place comes to represent creative uncertainty and the instability of the poetic identity. His nomadic movements across the vague borderlands between cultural heritage and imaginative realms express uncertainty about the efficacy of language and art.; Any sense of belonging to "places" is disrupted first by images of boggy, undefinable places of Door into the Dark (1969) and the recurring voices of dispossessed Gaelic culture in Wintering Out (1972). Agonizing self-incriminations for connivance with a violence-prone tribe displace him further into an imaginative haven in North (1975). That suprapolitical refuge, though, cannot provide solace because it is predicated upon Heaney's occupation of the very territory from which he must absent himself to preserve the integrity of his artistic vision. Furthermore, while actual emigration from Ulster ironically narrowed the gap between the realm of political turmoil and the territory of artistic contemplation, incessant obligations not loosened by emigration so anger him in Field Work (1979) that he deliberately thrusts past the guilt of evasion to the healing virtues of the poet-ploughman working the landscape of the lyrical line. Eventually, after tensions between artist and society are addressed in the purgatorial dialogues of Station Island (1985), the poet is reborn into a Sweeneyan internal exile, within home territory yet empowered to sing by the anguish of artistic solitude.; The progression away from and simultaneous immersion within home territory expresses Heaney's uncertainty about the authority of art under the influence of the rural, Catholic, Northern Irish heritage with which he so closely identifies. Asserting that artistic evasion of the Troubles is undesirable, he nonetheless is concerned that ready identification with that culture compromises artistic response to the Troubles. And feeling the obligation to interject his poetry into that politicized atmosphere, he ponders whether artistic language is powerful enough to transform a cause, offer a nurturing vision, or evoke redress of perceived injustices.; Heaney's created artistic solitude often has been thwarted by a sense of obligation to speak directly to the violence in Northern Ireland, though he often expresses his displacement from home culture through isolated personae. Keenly aware of socio-political developments in Northern Ireland yet reluctant to risk the "danger in that responsible, adjudicating stance towards communal experience," he seeks an active consciousness that withstands and envisages, that redresses the injustices of experience through artistic action. This project traces the incremental development of this ambiguous borderland between the realm of injustice and Heaney's republic of conscience, that mutable frontier in which artistic vitality confronts imposing tribal complicity, violence, and death. Place, then, represents the instability of a sense of belonging and the uncertainty of artistic identity and vision.