English 150: Comparing Seamus Heaney and WB Yeats

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Scholars Contrasting Seamus Heaney and WB Yeats

TA: Marthine Satris
Spring 2007

Stallworthy, Jon. “The Poet as Archaeologist: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney.” The Review of English Studies. Vol. XXXIII: 130, 1982. 158-174.

• “Heaney’s ‘Bog Queen,’ ‘little adulteress,’ and the girl’s head of the poem ‘Strange Fruit’ are at once victims, children, and priestesses of the maternal bog, the Mother Goddess that is his version of Kathleen Ni Houlihan. She bears little resemblance to Yeats’s and, indeed, it is clear that she is not meant to” (168).
• “Whereas Yeats looking back at the slaughter of Easter 1916 concluded: ‘A terrible beauty is born,’ Heaney sees not birth but death, endlessly repeated…” (170).
• “Yeats’s strategy is to equate his subject with some larger figure from antiquity, so that the luster of the old is transmitted to the new… Their change is from men into martyrs, a transformation that the poet endorses and, by his endorsement, helps to effect…That is not Heaney’s vision. His concern is not with the victors in defeat, but with the victims…” (172-3).

Sailer, Susan Shaw. “Time Against Time: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats and Heaney.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. Volume 17: 1, July 1991. 54-63.

• “Yeats’s several mythologies seek to transform a world indifferent to human needs to one marked by those needs. On the contrary, Heaney’s use of mythic elements speaks to their condition as metonymy, as one way among others for naming what is” (54).
• “Whereas for Yeats the notion of myth involves the advent of the supernatural into the natural, for Heaney myth expresses the past’s penetration of the present, the presentness of the past” (54).
• “Where Heaney uses mythic materials to explore and define human experience in time, Yeats creates mythologies to defy experience in time, orienting them toward the timeless” (62).