A vocable ground: the poetry of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney's consistent reliance upon earthy metaphors for language and consciousness is indicative of what he calls a poet's real "technique," his "stance towards life, a definition of his own reality." Through his eight volumes of poetry to date, Heaney has continually enlarged the symbolic and thematic dimensions of his landscape, his ground made vocable. Death of a Naturalist uses agricultural motifs to forward this notion of poetry as something buried in the primal "land" of language. Door Into the Dark, Wintering Out, and North base their digging on chthonic, etymological, and archaeological tropes, respectively.

After these volumes, Heaney begins a long reevaluation of such modes: Field Work, Sweeney Astray, and Station Island establish more overtly the social, the mythic, and the religious as contexts or "territories" for expression. Most recently, in The Haw Lantern, Heaney explores even broader matters—of perception, phenomenology, and value—through highly allegorical places of his own imagining. Heaney's movement from agriculture to allegory has given us one of the essential contributions to modern poetry in English by retrieving for us the kinships with earth and with language that twentieth-century literature has so often assumed to be lost or inconsequential.