4 - Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora

Summary

For a number of younger Irish poets, notably Paul Muldoon, Heaney has been the ‘strong precursor’ in whose shadow they have visibly struggled to clear their own poetic space and assert their own sense of autonomy and priority. The ‘belated’ poets' anxiety of influence and determination to define themselves against the example of the father-poet have undeniably led to the opening up of exciting new directions in Irish poetry. For Heaney, embedded in a traditional rural culture and a Catholic nationalist metaphysics, and influenced by the example of fellow Ulster poets, Kavanagh and Hewitt, culture and identity are immanent in place, and dislocation is the source of a profound anxiety. Heaney's poetry is driven by the Romantic search for a culture organically rooted in an authentic landscape. Having learnt from Kavanagh the social and artistic validity of the parochial and the peripheral, Heaney restores to the poetry of place the sense of myth and history, the element of cultural and political celebration and critique that are absent from Kavanagh's work. Stimulated by Hewitt's Protestant Planter version of Ulster rootedness, Heaney develops his own answering Catholic Gaelic myth of continuity grounded in the transcendental reality of place. Recuperating the impulses of the revival, which presupposed some intact inheritance from the past, he strives to affirm continuity and stability against the dominant perceptions of a sceptical, secular modernity.