/lit/ - Literature

>>1534547

OP here. Nice response.

Although I'm not entirely sure how serious my original statement was (I love Yeats), I don't think that what you're saying relates to Heaney's early works as much it does to his later stuff - the poet of Death of a Naturalist and North is deeply concerned with the fluidity of Irish identity - he himself had been criticised for not engaging with "the troubles", and as the child of protestant and catholic parents, a lot of his work seems to me to be asking the question of what it is to be Irish.

The later work - Field Work and Electric Light for example are far more sedate. With the nobel proze in his pocket and knowing he's the mack-daddy of British poetry (I think he accounts for about 75% of sales of all poetry in Britain), he's seems more manifesto building: he's now more certain of what it means to be Irish, and it's whatever he says it is.