Visions and Revisions: Seamus Heaney, ‘Foreign’ Poetry, and The Problem of Assimilation

Abstract

This essay considers the unusual position of Irish and Polish cultures and how it correlates to the construction of lyric subjects that appear unassimilable to dominant postcolonial literary-critical paradigms. Translation and assimilation become crucial concepts when understood in relation to attempts to take inspiration from foreign sources, especially when such attempts do not accord with typical patterns of influence. These concepts, however, only reveal their utility when they are grounded. The problem of assimilation is here considered in reference to debates over the Eastern European influences behind Seamus Heaney’s volume The Haw Lantern , which reveal the cultural pressures brought to bear upon a well-known poet whose work challenges dominant assumptions about the proper idiom of the Anglo-American lyric.