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

Title: Dwelling in the "Darkness Echoing" : the poetic vision of Seamus Heaney and Martin Heidegger
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2018, vol. 44, iss. 2, pp. [59]-76
Extent
[59]-76
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
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.
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