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

16 PÉTER DOLMÁNYOS since

—it has lived through various incarnations referred to by numerous terms but it has been essentially the same phenomenon. The vision is one of the cornerstones of Modernist poetry and it has survived into the contemporary scene as well, though perhaps on a more modest scale. Heaney's 'Bogland' is a poem of such an epiphanic moment

—Heaney sets out to find the Irish myth, a sister to the American one of the frontier, and the finding ends up as a plant: it grows by its own rules. We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening Everywhere the eye concedes To encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops' eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun. They've taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elk Out of the peat, set it up An astounding crate full of air. Butter sunk under More than a hundred years Was recovered salty and white. The ground itself is kind, black butter Melting and opening underfoot, Missing its last definition By millions of years. They'll never dig coal here, Only the waterlogged trunks Of great firs, soft as pulp. Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards,