On The Cultural Hybridity In The Characters Of Heaney's Poems

Seamus Heaney, born in 1939, is one of the most important poets and talented literary critic in the contemporary English poetry world. In his poetry creation, he puts the cultural and religious conflicts that he saw or experienced into various characters with lots of cultural meanings and symbols. His poems, known for their simplicity, clarity and exact word usage, are rich in meanings.Cultural hybridity refers to the mixed state between different cultures, which is mutually intertwined and difficult to distinguish and it can generate a space in the cultural intersection. Born in Mossbawn, an emblem of "split culture", Heaney grew in the atmosphere of Catholic culture and received British traditional culture, so his cultural formation is hybrid, which is embodied in his various kinds of poetic characters. In his poems, Heaney explores the root of Irish culture, shows the glamour of Irish traditional culture, digs out the factors that make Irish native culture colonized and oppressed, reveals the shameless and bossy culture of the colonizers, depicts the Northeners in Ireland who are willing to mediate their cultural conflicts but hesitating to take actions.This thesis mainly studies the cultural hybridity revealed in the characters depicted in Heaney's poems from the perspective of post-colonial theory. Through analyzing the cultural hybridity in these characters, it can be concluded that Heaney, rooted in his Irish traditional culture, puts forward the strategy of cultural coexistence and codevelopment which is helpful for solving the cultural conflicts in Northern Ireland, the study of which will help us to solve the world cultural conflicts from a broader vision and open mind, and also good for tackling the collision between the Western and Chinese cultural exchanges.