Socio-Political Commitment in Seamus Heaney's Poetry

Abstract

In recent times, various critics and theorists have problematized the concept of a literary artifact as expressing an unchanging human nature. No utterance is now considered innocuous. All cultural expressions are related to the social and political context. Current theories have displaced the liberal humanist concept of ‘universal’ literature. Even the works that have no overt political overtones are held to be political. In this paper, I shall examine this relationship between poetry and politics in Heaney's poetry and try to decipher, with the aid of textual analysis, Heaney's approach towards poetry as politics.