Dwelling in the "Darkness Echoing" : the poetic vision of Seamus Heaney and Martin Heidegger

Vol.44,No.2(2018)

Kamran Ahmadgoli Seyed-Nima Taheri-Azam

https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2018-2-4

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/140977

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Abstract
This essay aims to study Seamus Heaney's vision of poetry, particularly concerning his early oeuvre, in the light of Heidegger's approach to poetic language, memory, and dwelling. A Heideggerian reading of the prominent rural and agrarian sensibility of Heaney's early poems demonstrates how objects and topological features as poetized in his work exceed symbolic representation, and bring forth the aletheia of Being, and how the sense of the unhomely/uncanny in the poet's work serves to gather his community in the same vicinity where co-presencing, letting-be of the other [Gelassenheit], and staying with things assure the unity of the fourfold. The bog, as the principal trope of Heaney's oeuvre, is closely studied, in a cautiously de-politicized context, to reveal a feminine, pre-reflective realm of memory traces, inviting the reader to listen in thoughtful remembrance to the call of Mnemosyne. Thus, Heaney's poetic vision is rendered in terms of an authentic attunement to the maternal-feminine silence of Being, recorded as "rhythm" or the "sound of sense" at the threshold of the pre-linguistic origins of language.

Keywords:
Heaney; Heidegger; the Bog; Mnemosyne; The Fourfold

Pages:
59–76
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