Making a Dantean Poetic: Seamus Heaney's "Ugolino"

Abstract

Beginning with Field Work (1979), and continuing with Electric Light (2001), Sea mus Heaney's poetry, translations, and criticism have engaged with the poetic example of Dante. Although he has produced translations from the Irish and Anglo-Saxon, and has explored affinities with poets including Lowell, Frost, Walcott, Larkin, Milosz, Swir, and Herbert, Heaney has consistently returned to Dante during the past twenty-five years of his career. examples are many: he has translated Cantos I?III of the Inferno and published them in Daniel Halpern's Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets (1993) pilgrimage sequences and encounters with familiar ghosts in Station Island (1985) are closely modeled on the design of Dante's Inferno. Most impor tant, he has created and continues to explore a Dantean poetic in his own work. After writing the poems of Field Work and Station Island, Heaney has shown his inclination toward Dante's example by working in such forms as the three-line tercets and the occasional terza rima, forms which amplify his earlier reliance on quatrains and sonnets. At Heaney's poetry readings, audiences can hear Dante's formal example in the adaptations of terza rima in his verse as well as in his commentaries, many of which point to Dante's pervasive and philosophically liberating influence in his work.1 In two poems from Field Work, The Strand at Lough Beg and Ugolino, the auditory qualities, or the acoustic of Heaney's language, signal his immer sion in the poetics and habits of mind cultivated by Dante. first of the poems in Field Work to announce Dante's influence on Heaney's new poetic direction is The Strand at Lough Beg, a powerful elegy for his murdered cousin, Colm McCartney. poem's epigraph and its final images of loss, mourning, and poetic reparation are borrowed from the first canto of the Pur gatorioy in Dorothy Sayers's translation. This poem also signals Heaney's engage ment with the visionary and ethical Dante and his fascination with the influence of the poet on other poets. Other Field Work poems, especially the elegies and