Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests. /I'll dig with it." With these final words, the poem "Digging" began 1995 Nobel Prize winner and Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet Seamus Heaney's first collection of poems (Death of a Naturalist) in 1966, inaugurating an entire corpus of work that resonates majestically with themes of searching, wandering and exploring ever downward and inward. Each of his collections of poetry, while encompassing individually different personal, historical, social and political modes, echoes with similar thematic and imagistic ideas. Until now, there really was no comprehensive retrospective of Heaney's work...
...chronological organization of the book shows the trajectory of Heaney's extensive digging 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...
...today's audiences, however, is not just another indulgence of "ethnic swank," he says. Because, 0 as he argued in one of the Wednesday "Talking Shop" discussions, "The English tongue is something that's grown beyond the nation." English speakers who are not English nationals can claim the poem as part of their linguistic genealogy as legitimately as those who carry English passports, he argued...
Though the Irish and the English have historically fought bloody battles over every sort of territory, Heaney's move is not one that furthers that conflict. His reclamation of Beowulf does not violently uproot the epic poem from its English context and encourage ethnic possessiveness. In fact, it bridges at least one gap between the two parties...
...much as their violent history has pulled them apart, the English and the Irish do at least speak the same language. This helps explain why Heaney did not necessarily resent his inclusion is an anthology of "English" literature compiled by Faber and Faber, Co. Though he did write a poem that asserted his passport was definitely green (the color of the Irish passport), Heaney did not think the book's editors intended to commandeer his writing: "I don't think they were Tally-Ho imperialists out to appropriate wee Seamus," he said...