Augustan Poetic Tradition Essay -- The Outlaw Seamus Heaney Poetry Ess

Augustan Poetic Tradition I do not in fact see how poetry can survive as a category of human consciousness if it does not put poetic considerations firstexpressive considerations, that is, based upon its own familial laws which spring into operation at the moment of lyric conception. Seamus Heaney, The Indefatigable Hoof-taps (1988) Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate, is one of the most widely read and celebrated poets now writing in English. He is also one of the most traditional. Over a decade ago, Ronald Tamplin summed up Heaneys achievement and his relation to the literary tradition in a judgment that mud sound today In many ways he is not an innovative poet. He has not recast radically the habitual language of poetry. He has not challenged our preconceptions with a new poetic form nor has he led us into the recognition of new rhythms and metres. Instead he has worked with what was to hand and brought to it great powers of formula and art as well as a significant subjec t matter (Tamplin 1). At the same time, Sidney Burris was making a similar point Readers of his verse must continually remind themselves that Heaney, perhaps more so than most other contemporary poets, is a deeply literary poet, one whose consolations often trickery in the invigorating strains of the poetic tradition itself (Burris ix). For Heaney, those strains are primarily formal. I frost / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing, Heaney writes in Personal Helicon, the final poesy in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Although rhyme here signifies, more generally, writing in verse, whether rhymed or free, Heaney is certainly drawn to rhyme and closed forms. He is especially partial to rhymed tr... ... Wilson. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Critical Quarterly 16 (Spring 1974) 35-48. Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. bran-new York W. W. Norton, 1971.Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.Heaney, Seamus. Poems 1965 - 1975. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.____________. Preoccupations Selected Prose 1968 - 1978. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.ONeill, Charles L. Violence and the Sacred in Seamus Heaneys North. In Seamus Heaney The Shaping Spirit. Edited by Catharine Malloy and Phyllis Carey. Newark University of Delaware Press, 1996 91-105.Parker, Michael. Seamus Heaney The Making of the Poet. Iowa City University of Iowa Press, 1993.Tamplin, Ronald. Seamus Heaney. Milton Keynes Open University Press, 1989.