Violence in Seamus Heaney's poetry

Abstract

hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity (ʿThe Grauballe Manʾ) If, as Seamus Heaney says, quoting Borges, 'poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on pages', then we might recognise that the issues involved in the depiction of violence may differ from reader to reader or, more generally, from one national readership - in this case Irish, British, or American and other Anglophone readers - to another. We know readers have registered their approval of Heaney's poetry in the sales figures of Waterstone's, Barnes & Noble's, and other booksellers, and this popularity has been confirmed by most of the prizes. Yet reviewers who might represent these readerships have differed widely in their responses to what the Swedish Academy praised as Heaney's 'analysis of the violence in Northern Ireland'.