Word: irelands
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...motif over the course of his work. Digging first appeared in his earlier books such as Death of a Naturalist, Door Into the Dark, and to some extent the prose-poem collection Stations in their use of language to delve into the fertile cultural expanses of his childhood in Ireland. This "digging" into his private and cultural past (first addressed in his famous poem by that same name) soon unearthed the central myth of the bog people, men and women (apparently sacrificed to Mother Earth to guarantee a good harvest in prehistoric times) that were recently found in the swamplands...
Heaney was too gentle a lover of language to ever write anything overtly jingoistic or propagandistic in defense or incitement of Ireland, choosing instead to write subtle but equally powerful works urging by implication (meaning that has to be "dug up" from the earth of the poems) the recovery of Irish culture through the overthrow of those foreign "invaders." This light but equally effective touch, driven almost exclusively by the power of image rather than the power of overt explication, was criticized by many political figures in Ireland for being too ineffective and too oblique, but Heaney gave the impression...
Second, Thatcher might have launched a war on the Irish Republican Army, but it was under her government that Britain and Ireland first made joint efforts to make peace in Northern Ireland. Finally, DeDeo presents Thatcher's confrontation with Arthur Scargill's coal unions as economically disruptive--never mind that the 1980s were on the whole a boom-time for the English economy. Thatcher's actions against the overpowerful unions were actually key to the restructuring of Britain that went on during her tenure...
...Prize-winning poet and Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet, agonizes over the problems of place and the mixed emotions of homecoming. Often compared by critics to noted expatriates (and fellow Nobel Laureates) Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, Heaney frequently writes about returning as an outsider to his homeland in Ireland. There he finds a rich heritage of language and myth, subjugated by the fear-driven assimilation of British culture forced upon Ireland with the onset of "The Troubles...
Coming from a culturally rich but economically poor Roman Catholic farming family in Northern Ireland, a world that would pervade his early works and continues to haunt his writing, Heaney attended Queen's University, Belfast and taught at several other universities before ending up at Harvard, where he taught a poetry workshop every spring semester until he won the Nobel Prize...