Word: heaneys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This task is laid out in the first poem in the book, "Digging" (1966), which is one of Heaney's most famous works. It is also one of many that directly address the writing process itself...
...Heaney does literally dig in many of his poems, stripping away the soil layer by layer and showing us the peat, potatoes, bones, down to the "wet centre" of "Atlantic seepage...
Through this sort of excavation, Heaney argues that the outer contours of the present landscape are simply the surface form of an inner, accumulated past. It is an appropriate theme for a poet whose homeland continues to suffer from deep-rooted and ancient political conflict...
...archaeologist's tools are of use not just on the national and political level, but in discussing the inner life of the poet himself. In several poems Heaney describes an incident from his youth or a Yeatsian encounter with a stranger, and then shows how this core event has continued to shape his consciousness...
...many of his earlier works, particularly, Heaney shows a fascination with the metaphor of archaeology. In poems selected from his books Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), he deals at length with the "bog people," prehistoric humans whose bodies scientists have recovered, almost perfectly preserved, from peat bogs in Denmark. These long-buried victims of "tribal, intimate revenge" become symbols of the collective subconscious of their modern descendants...