Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Péter Dolmányos: An Outline of the Relationship Between Romanticism and Contemporary Irish Poetry
12 PÉTER DOLMÁNYOS Implicit in those lines is a view of poetry which I think is implicit in the few poems I have written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being ' plants. 2 This is a passage at once modest and ambitious: modest in referring to those 'few poems' of his and ambitious in establishing a kinship between his poetry and that of Wordsworth. The sentence is a rhetorical victory in its meandering structure and also in its manipulations of bringing to light Heaney's own (in a positive sense) obsession with the physical and metaphorical acts of uncovering, or as he calls them, 'digging.' As far as actual physical uncovering is concerned, Wordsworth is perhaps not the archetypal digger but his 'spots of time' render him as an important precedent to the kind of poetry defined above. The idea of 'revelation of the self to the self is a point of crucial significance: it defines an essential moment of the Romantic tradition and it establishes a link between the contemporary scene and the Romantic period. There is an emphasis on the self, in fact a double emphasis as the 'self is both the direct and indirect object of the clause, which is one of the cornerstones of Romanticism. The overtones of the word 'revelation' suggest something of the religious or quasi-religious nature of the poetic act. If poems are considered as 'elements of continuity' that may echo the idea that the language of poetry has preserved something of the original relationship between language and reality; this may be yet another point where Romantic and contemporary are linked. Heaney's affinities with Wordsworth have been noted by various critics; it is especially his first two volumes, Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, whose poems are noted for their allegiance to Words2 Heaney, S. "Feeling into Words." In: Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968—1978. New York, The Noonday Press, 1980, p. 4L The essay is the script of a lecture given at the Royal Society of Literature, October 1974.
