A Study Of Seamus Heaney’s Listening Poetics

Seamus Heaney is a distinguished Northern Irish poet who never loses his huge appeal to the worldwide audience. While his poems draw much more attention, his poetic studies, albeit less discussed, are arousing more and more interest in the academy. Among those poetic studies with respect to Heaney’s aural and sounding elements in his oeuvre, however, most of them center around the analysis of the poem’s writing techniques such as artistic features, leaving relatively unexplored Heaney’s listening poetics and its practice. As an earnest and meticulous listening poet, Heaney infuses his listening credos into his poetry writings, i.e. place-name poems and bog poems, which are the practice of his listening poetics. By dint of textual analysis, this thesis fathoms out Heaney’s listening poetics:through the deposit of useful sounding elements into the "listening cellar", the imitation of "original accents" from other ideal speakers, and the sounding of "personal voices" of one’s own signature, poetry can realize an order that not only responds to the external reality of the outside world, but also remains truthful to the artistic integrity of a poet’s inner laws. Against the backdrop of today’s vision-dominant culture in the western thought, Heaney’s listening poetics and its practice is of great significance and value in that it not only further gathers momentum in apologizing for ear in the filed of poetry and provides a lens through which people can gain a better view of his prose and poetry, but also points out a fresh way of living poetically in the contemporary world, i.e. learn to listen more.