Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
“The Given Note” Traditional Music, Crisis And The Poetry Of Seamus Heaney, Seán Crosson Dr.
“The Given Note” Traditional Music, Crisis And The Poetry Of Seamus Heaney, Seán Crosson Dr.
Seán Crosson
This paper proposes that at a time when Northern Ireland increasingly descended into civil strife and crisis, Seamus Heaney looked to landscape, and to a lesser but comparable, extent traditional music, to articulate a distinctive voice, beyond the claims of tradition and community, ‘to use the first person singular’ as he has remarked, ‘to mean me and my lifetime’. Indeed, Heaney has faced a crisis of identity that has preoccupied Irish poets since at least the time of Yeats, a crisis brought on by the discontinuity in the Irish literary tradition, by an unresolved postcolonial condition and a struggle between …