Private and Public Voices in Irish Poetry: W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney (Politics, History).

Abstract

Although W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney represent different generations and traditions of twentieth-century Irish poets, their poetry shares the impulse to project both public (essentially political) as well as private (essentially spiritual) voices. Individual chapters of the dissertation examine how images of "place" in the poets' works transform private feelings into public statement. Yeat's early work, inspired by the "Celtic twilight," presents the Sligo l and scape and the legends of the folk culture, but only foreshadows the authoritative voice of the later work, which presents a version of the Anglo-Irish tradition by relying on images of Georgian architecture, the "courteous" Galway gentry, and eighteenth-century politics. Kavanagh rejects the artifice of Yeats's use of myth and history by deliberately exploiting--reverently or mockingly--the parochialism of his rural Monaghan upbringing. The Great Hunger most significantly exposes a sinister and subtle violence in the metaphoric power of the institutions of the l and . Kavanagh prepares the way for other poets, like Heaney, native to farm life. Heaney applies his central metaphor (the poet as farmer and turf-cutter) in less provincial, more universal terms, as the bog poems explore the cultural roots of violence in barbaric Europe and medieval and early modern Irel and . Heaney's anthropology clearly associates the structures of language with those that generate violence. Yeats considers language as only an emblem of force. Still, Heaney's response to the ever-recurring "troubles" in the North is not as bold and definitive as Yeats's. Another chapter is devoted to Yeats's treatment of violence, which his poetry embodies, and which lends power to his words. The configuration of myth (Cuchulain and Cathleen), history (Emmet and Wolfe Tone), occult philosophy (A Vision), and politics (Parnell, Pearse, and the Blueshirts) sustains Yeats's prophetic vision and remains the measure for current writers. No Irish poet since has cultivated so forceful an idea of "nation" and "soul." The achievement of the three poets has implications outside of Irel and : poets of many "developing" countries project strong public voices rooted in private identifications of "race" and "soul."