Heaney’s Spiritual Archaeology and the Poetic Promise of Political Memory

Abstract

Poetry for Seamus Heaney has an ‘archaeological’ function. Much of Heaney’s poetry engages with the cultural amnesia that the atmosphere of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland threatens with. Against this distortion of historical memory by contemporary events and also by the forces of globalization, Heaney works with the belief inherited from Wordsworth that poetry ‘enshrine[s] the spirit of the past / For future restoration.’ Rather than the factual correction of distortions, poetry, hence, is more intent at preserving the ‘spirit’ of the past – which is not to say that facts are treated as redundant, but that in poetry facts lead us to the spirit of the past. With reference to specifically poems from the collection The Haw Lantern, the paper shall enquire as to what form of memory does poetry then engage with. This is spiritual archaeology since poetry is conceived as response towards spirits of the past, like that of Diogenes or the mud vision. Poetry is the call of responsibility when the past is being ‘dissipated in news’. Memory in poetry is also spiritual in the sense that it has a spiritual purpose – it preserves the sense of justice and a promise for future within a reality of violence. The possibility of ‘restoration’ is held out by a past that is itself strung with violent incidences. The paper shall interrogate poetry’s ambivalent dealings with memory and violence that occur in the process. Poetry and literature in general, we will see, shares a radical relation with history, but a radicalization that is politically an antidote of that other form of radicalization that potentially leads to terrorism. The paper shall discuss where these two radical trajectories concerning history vitally differ.