Heaney and Yeats: Public and Private Poets

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Seamus Heaney and William Butler Yeats are two of the greatest Irish poets, a fact recognized by the critical attention they have attracted and by the many awards and accolades they won in their lifetimes, including the Nobel Prize. The sad and unexpected death of Seamus Heaney now enables us to begin to see his literary canon as a whole and to start to make assessments of his role in the literary history of Ireland. This is what the present course will attempt, using as a yardstick and comparison the career and poetry of W. B. Yeats. Although from significantly different backgrounds, both lived in turbulent times, both were keenly aware of the Irish traditions which gave their work its identity, and both were acutely sensitive to the historical, political, and cultural forces which helped shape their poetry. They both brooded intensely on the nature of poetry and on the need for a rigorous attention to technique and craft to avoid falling into rhetoric in their public poetry and sentimentality in their more private and autobiographical work. Their gifts in both cases extended to playwriting and to perceptive and influential critical writings, which raise questions about the nature of poetry, illuminate their own practices, and contextualize their respective canons The essence of the course will be close reading of major poems and texts by both poets, and, growing out of this, developing a comparison of their approaches to poetry and to the themes that engaged and occupied their imaginations. We shall resist any temptation to force the two into a false symbiotic relationship, and their differences will be as important in our attempts to ‘place' them as their similarities. We shall begin with a biographical and historical overview of their careers, illuminated by their own life-writings and poems of particularly personal significance. We then move on to examine the literary and cultural contexts in which they began to write (paying attention in particular to what Heaney had to say of Yeats, and how Yeats appears in his work); to appraise their early poems in providing a foundation for their respective careers; to discuss how and why they learned to be public poets; to compare how they addressed the question of violence; to assess their achievements as ‘private' and love poets; and to explore the nature and scope of their criticism (especially their writings on the art and practice of poetry). We shall conclude by attempting to assess their contribution to, and place in, the modern Irish literary tradition. The main texts for the class will be Yeats's Collected Poems and Heaney's Selected Poems. These will be supplemented by a course book which will make available further poems by Heaney and extracts from both writers' prose works, as well as providing the texts of poems or other significant work by those who influenced them.