Digging for the roots in Seamus Heaney's poetry

This thesis explores the impact of the Irish culture on Seamus Heaney's poetry. It is stimulated by two important questions which are firstly why the Irish culture is significant for the poet and secondly why he uses the English language rather than the Gaelic one. It is underlined in this study that the English language is skillfully employed as a means to transmit his message of his original Irish culture. For this reason, Heaney is considered more Irish than British, which is a very important point I am going to develop upon to bring a better understanding of Heaney's employment of Irish symbols, themes and metaphors in English. Actually he uses powerful poetic devices of his art to allude to the brutal oppressive methods of strong nations upon weak ones, attributable to the dominion of English culture over Irish culture. This dominion results in the recession of the Irish culture in general and the Gaelic language in particular. In his poetry, he is trying to reconcile his Irish identity with the English language and find a place in the English language for his identity resisting the identity of the oppressor. As a result, Heaney strives to reestablish the balance in Irish culture in its broadest sense by the deliberate choice of his mother tongue, the English language. He utilizes specifically the English language to deal with Irish problematic issues through political, social and religious critique, which enables him to undermine the negative assumptions of the colonists. However, he eschews involving himself in political debates. The historical approach is used to support the claims of this study. The first chapter depicts the Irish culture and the discrimination against the Irish people. The second chapter refers to the bog people as compared to the violated people of Heaney's ancestors especially in Ulster. The third chapter exposes the English and Viking dominance over the Irish lands and farms. Yet, the English dominance is portrayed with special emphasis because Ulster (Northern Ireland) became officially part of Britain. Aligning past, which includes history and memory, with the present is relentlessly one of the most notable strategies pertaining to his writing. KEY WORDS: Seamus Heaney, Ireland, Colonialism, Mythology.