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‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there
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Seamus Heaney, once dubbed by fellow poet Robert Lowell as ‘the best Irish poet since W
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Yeats’, created a powerful and precise poetic canon that clutched at nature, tradition, the self,
and traumatic global events
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The relationship he shares between the past and present
circulates within his work; past memories and events seem cyclical in nature, often resurrecting
previous literary works, with other intertextual allusions to other poets
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Similar to his 2001
collection Electric Light, District and Circle once again addressed the millennial terrorist atrocities
that occurred on a local and international scale
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By intertextualising Romantic poets, he exposed an influence of the ‘Individual’
and the ‘Self’ that eighteenth century writers such as Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth
developed
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3 Despite two
hundred years separating these two writers apart, they demonstrated a similar dedication to
capture the contemporary moment and contribute a new perspective
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In this essay, comparisons will be
drawn between the different representations of temporality each poet presents, and an
examination of how Heaney’s poems reflect the present moment, inflected with his historical,
emotional and literary past in contrast to Wordsworth’s works
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W
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2099
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3
Michael Parker, ‘Fallout from the thunder: Poetry and Politics in Seamus Heaney’s
District and Circle’ in Irish Studies Review, 16
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269) in Taylor & Francis Online
th
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org/10
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literature, which saw the regional identity assume a greater centrality as a major theme within Irish
writing
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‘The Nod’ gestures to his memory of IRA
militants patrolling his community during the conflict: ‘Neighbours with guns, parading up and
down’, cleverly juxtaposed with the description of the butcher’s hanging animal carcasses ‘seeping
blood
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33) to underline the atrocities that once lurked in Ireland’s
past
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After many publications exposing the war shadowed natural landscape and damaged Irish
identity, Seamus Heaney was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature
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6 He embraced the history and language of
his country, frequently translating Irish stories and poems into English such as ‘Poet to Blacksmith’,
an instructional poem originally written in the eighteenth century by Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin,
directed to a person also named Séamus
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25-27)
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An evident
clue suggestive that for Heaney, literary history is cyclical – temporality can fluctuate and literary
history can repeat itself through intertextualisation, adding emphasis and depth to a subject
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S
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7 Eliot demonstrates there is great
significance in reaffirming the historical in literature, whereby a writer can be ‘acutely conscious of
his place in time, contributing to his own contemporaneity
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96
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33
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6
Helen Vendler, ‘Poetry: Seamus Heaney’ in The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), 20
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th
93) in JSTOR ...
org/stable/40259304> [accessed 10 March 2014]
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S
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4, (September, 1919), 84-89, (p
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8
T
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Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in The Egoist, 5
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85)
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However, a sense of ‘timelessness’ can still be achieved by tracing back to ones history or
legacy
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By reviving
history, ‘timelessness’ and the ‘traditional’ are still evoked from his poetry, despite his own personal
history inflecting the poetry
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During this
time, philosophers and scientists regarded language as being atomic in structure, each word
referring to a single idea
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9 Language consisted of an arbitrary system of signs and
poetry was merely decorative and ornamental
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11 Quoted from the ‘Advertisement’ in Lyrical Ballads, he stated that these poems ‘are to
be considered as experiments’ for the purposes of ‘poetic pleasure’ and that people of his time ‘may
disapprove of the style’
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Wordsworth’s elegiac poem ‘London 1802’, addresses the deceased writer John Milton - ‘Thou
shoudst be living at this hour:/England hath need of thee:/She is a fen of stagnant waters’
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14 It is apparent that in Wordsworth’s own present observation of
London, he longed for the virtues and values of the past to unshackle the public from their societal
constraints and misery - ‘We are selfish men; / Oh! Raise us up, return to us again;/ And give us

9

Florence Marsh, Wordsworth’s Imagery: A Study in Poetic Vision, (London: Archan Books, 1963), p
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Ibid, p
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11
P
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S
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by
Stuart Curran, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p
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12
nd
William Wordsworth, ‘Advertisement’, in Lyrical Ballads – Wordsworth and Coleridge, 2 edn, ed
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L
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R
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8
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by Margaret Ferguson,
Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, (London: W
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Norton, 2005), p
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1-3
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795, ll
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10

manners, virtue, freedom, power
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Although, some critics lack
sentiment for Heaney’s romantic treatment
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16 Even though Heaney was not a
devout Romantic writer, he challenged normative writing styles and pushed to create an alternative
perspective on a subject
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As Dawson states, ‘it was the poet’s role to keep open a sense of
alternative possibility[…]in a society whose practises and beliefs constituted a denial of human
imagination and creativity’
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Where Wordsworth advocated a radical wave of thinking and a deviation from historical
convention, Heaney retained his ancestry and embraced history
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18 The bog body persona reveals a state of consciousness - ‘My eye at turf level
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’, ‘when I was buried and unburied’, uprooted out of the earth and connects spiritually ‘I was like turned turf in the breath of God’ (DAC, pp
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Laden with natural imagery, Heaney
infers a close relationship and knowledge to the plants and earth, ‘trickles of kesh water, sphagnum
moss,/ Dead bracken on the spreadfield, red as rust’ (DAC, p
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‘Naked except for/ The cap, noose
and girdle’, imagines a migrant labourer who is the victim of a ritual sacrifice
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‘Wordsworth Skates’ is another poetic example of how Heaney breathes new life into an old
figure, focusing instead on Wordsworth’s ‘bootless runners lying toppled/ In a display case, /Their
bindings perished’ (DAC, p
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Here, the focus is to an object associated to Wordsworth, instead of
an elaborate, typically romantic homage to the poet
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15

Ibid, p
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6-8
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4 (Spring, 1990), 461th
492, (p
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) in JSTOR ...
org/stable/3831415> [accessed 10 March 2014]
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M
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Dawson, ‘Poetry in an age of revolution’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed
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79
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Mahony, Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition, (New York: St
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46
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A sense of time is not
explicit; however a form of nostalgia is presented, allowing the reader to imagine a temporal space
for themselves
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3)
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Personified, the
machine speaks ‘This is the way God sees life’ it said, ‘from seedling-braird to snedder[…]as it
dropped its raw sliced mess, bucketful by glistering bucketful’ (DAC, p
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Farming techniques of the
past appear to be obliterated by the use of modern day machinery, reducing manual labour to
become an obsolete past time
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’19

Heaney frequently interacts with his own personal history, the autobiographical poem ‘The
Blackbird of Glanmore’ reminisces back to his childhood days spent at Glanmore cottage, ‘In front of
my house of life’ (DAC, P
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The eponymous blackbird, reappeared from his childhood, incurs a sense of inevitable fate,
intermingled with a content resignation that the bird will be ‘In the ivy when I leave’ (DAC, p
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The
reappearance of this blackbird from his early memories conveys a sense of ‘timelessness’, the
blackbird, a constant figure, ‘On the grass when I arrive,/ In the ivy when I leave’ just as he
remembers from his childhood
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‘Senior Infants’, an extract of prose separated into
three parts each presented in verse form complete with stanzas with no rhyme scheme, also allows
the reader to peer through his childhood memories deployed through analepsis – ‘I met Duffy/
Whom I had known before the age of reason’ (DAC, p
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The people Heaney encountered in his life form a strong trope within his poems, Heaney
immortalises their memory forever on the page
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independent
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uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/district-and-circle-by-seamus-heaney473062
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‘Miss Walls’ (DAC, PP
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However, the question to whether this is truly a
piece of timeless text can be raised
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Therefore, Eliot may have rejected Heaney’s exposition of personal and emotional history, as his
argument states it prevents the creation of any contemporary fusions if the language is lodged in the
poet’s past, potentially alienating the reader
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In conclusion, both writers represent the past and present with different motives and
Heaney displays an influence to Romantic poetical forms and style
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The question to
whether one can truly represent the present without looking to the past, is subjective
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Reaching back into the past is not irrelevant; it
can elevate and add emphasis to a poem referring to the present
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As Heaney rightly states in ‘The Blackbird of
Glanmore’ - ‘History [is] not to be granted the last word/ Or the first claim
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56)

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Title: Essay; A compare and contrast between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth
Description: A University Undergraduate level essay exploring the comparisons and contrasts between Irish Poet Laureate Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth's poetry and how they have represented interactions between the past and the present. MHRA referencing with footnotes included. Ideal for English Literature or Language courses.

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