" Question me again" : l'élégie dans Opened Ground de Seamus Heaney

Abstract

The genre of the elegy, in Seamus Heaney 's poetry, stems from an original design : in an effort to overcome the silence - the silence caused by absence or following political assassination - the elegiac poem incorporates a questioning of its own aesthetic and political legitimacy. Thus is asserted a kind of speech, tuned in a minor key, in which the poet, oscillating between the duty of silence and the duty to remember, is always in search of the right note.