Seamus Heaney's and the dual role of the poet in selected poems of haw lantern

Abstract EN

Seamus Heaney is one of the major contemporary poets who managed to achieve a distinguished place in the map of contemporary poetry in English.

His Irish heritage and the influence of English language and its culture on his poetry make him a contemporary Yeats, troubled like his predecessor, with the question of identity.

Throughout fifty years of writing, his poetry reflects the poet's struggle and inner conflicts over the question of heritage and his relationship to the two cultures that cultivated his poetic career.

In relation to this conflict, Heaney suffered the dilemma over his role as an artist and the demand of the public to be their spokesman : whether he should be citizen of the world of imagination and art or be the mouthpiece of reality.

This paper discusses the development of the poet as he is trying to reconcile the artist in him with that of the public speaker which he practiced successfully during the Irish Troubles in the 1970s.

His efforts to achieve this reconciliation started in the last part of "Station Island" and continued till he achieved dual citizenship in the Haw Lantern (1987).

Selected poems are chosen to study the dilemma the poet has suffered and the duality of his role as a writer ; they are : "Digging", "TollundMan" and the last part of "Station Island" as part of his early poetry that expressed his dilemma.

Three poems were chosen from Haw Lantern which reflects the poet's acceptance of his dual "citizenship" ; they are : "Terminus", "From the Frontier of Writing" and "From the Republic of Conscience".