Chapter 13 - Elegy

Summary

This chapter argues that the elegy as a genre and the elegiac as a mode are central to Seamus Heaney’s writing and his overall thinking about poetry. Across his career, a persistent lyric response to loss or death goes beyond set-piece or occasional poems of mourning and consolation. Heaney’s writing is dominated by an intrinsically elegiac poetics that at once presents and theorizes poetry’s engagement with grievous human experience, while offering the prospect of care and even healing. Reading Heaney as an elegist writing into a vast elegiac tradition and an actual world replete with suffering, this poet’s grand concern is health over comfort, hope over affect. Starting with Heaney’s childhood intimacy with death, this chapter considers how the ordering principle of “grief and metre” allows his poetry to engage death’s discomfiting, rupturing force through a sanguine equanimity about the human capacity for the endurance of grief.