Poets' Responsibilities

As the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, Seamus Heaney (1939- ) is one of the most important poets in contemporary English poetry world. As far as Heaney's poetic career is concerned, it can be divided into three stages. In the initial stage, Heaney depicts the typical Irish landscapes based on his hometown-Mossbown, Derry in Northern Ireland. In the next stage, with the unique place-name poems and bog poems, Heaney reproduces the historical roots of political and sectarian conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, showing his poetic care for contemporary Ireland. In 1980s, Heaney moves to the third stage which is also known as philosophic stage. In this stage, instead of direct treatment in Irish politics thematically, he writes many philosophic poems which signify the universal significance from the perspective of local view.The study of Heaney's poetry has become a hot issue in Chinese academic world since 1995. Many scholars have studied his poems in the first and the second stage in depth, but few has touched the poems in the third stage. As the opening collection of his third stage, Station Island (1984) is not paid enough attention by the domestic scholars. There aren't specific interpretations of this collection itself and the importance of it. This thesis aims at discussing the theme of this collection from the perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism. Born in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland, Heaney fell in a dilemma between social responsibility and poetic responsibility in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which constituted the context of the collection Station Island. With Dantean meditation, Heaney began his three-day spiritual pilgrimage in Station Island. After confronting with a series of ghosts in Station Island, Heaney cleared up his spiritual anxieties and found the nirvana way from individual to history and the whole society. Heaney makes a breakthrough of his style in Station Island. What is more important is that Heaney in the collection demonstrates his reflections on poet's responsibilities and poet's role as a public intellectual in the society. It is significant to contemporary Irish poets. Furthermore, it sets an example for contemporary artists to ponder over the issue of art's functions in current society.