Word: heaneys
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Fundamental to Heaney's success is his ability to recreate his native landscape on the page. The smoothness of the hills and the scuff of gravel under thick-soled shoes make themselves felt not just in the words' literal meaning but in the assonance and consonance of their sound. It is a world whose outer forms are rounded, full with what lies beneath. This external landscape then becomes a thing to be explored, dug into, its inner forms revealed...
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...