Seamus Heaney의 詩 世界 : 椰土에서 祖國, 그리고 人類社會로

Abstract

This paper is no more than a preliminary survey of the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the leading poet of Ireland and England today. Heaney's poetry seems to have sprung from his native province which is Anahorish in County Derry in Northern Ireland and extended to its history and culture and then finally to the society of all human beings. This is strictly my own view of Heaney's poetry, which may be altered to some extent with my further reading of his poetry in the future. At the moment, however, this notion of mine concerning the three phases of Heaney's poetic development has fairly firmly been placed in my mind. For the first phase of Heaney's poetic development, I have examined a number of his early poems such as "Mid-Term Break," "Digging,""Follower," "The Early Purges," "The Diviner," "Rite of Spring, and" "The Forge." For the second phase of his poetic development, I have discussed one particular poem entitled "The Tollund Man." For the third phase of his poetic development, I have also introduced only one poem which is "Seeing Things," the title poem of a poetic collection with the same title published in 1991. With the growing awareness of Seamus Heaney's poetic achievement, his reputation has been well established both in England and Amertica. To me it seems that Heaney is a poet who has an exceptional skill of describing things, of concrete or abstract, in words to such a degree that it can never be surpassed by any other poets. In other words, he is a superb magician in words. After W B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, he seems to be the most important modem poet.