Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

Synopsis

Seamus Heaney's Prose Poetics Return Repeatedly To The Adequacy Of Poetry, Its Ameliorative, Restorative Response To The Violence Of Public Historical Life. It Is A Curiously Equivocal Ideal, And As Such Most Clearly Demonstrates The Intellectual Origins, The Humanist Character, And The Inherent Strains Of These Poetics, The Work Of One Of The World's Leading Poet-critics Of The Last Thirty Years. 'seamus Heaney And The Adequacy Of Poetry' Provides A Study Of The Development Of Heaney's Thought And Its Central Theme. Introduction: The Idea Of Adequacy -- 1. The Voices Of My Education -- The Origins Of An Idea -- Educating Voices -- The Emerging Poet-critic -- 2. Elements Of Continuity -- History Is A Nightmare -- An Unstable Amalgam -- In A Field Of Force -- 3. A Shift In Trust -- Towards A Purer Paradigm -- Differentiations -- Falling Into Dualism -- 4. Poetry Is Its Own Reality -- Muscular Humanism -- Rejecting Neruda -- A Redemptive Logic -- 5. To Construct Something Upon Which To Rejoice -- Working Up An Idiom -- The Redress Of Poetry -- Joy And Night -- Supreme Fictions -- The Prose Revisions. John Dennison. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 225-238) And Index.