Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

""Molino has written one of the best extended studies of Heaney's poetry that I have seen. . . . [He] sets Heaney's work in a clear cultural context and offers sensitive close readings of individual poems. . . . This sort of book on Heaney--a detailed and thoughtful examination of his canon--has long been needed. . . . Heaney scholars will encounter much in it that will cause them to modify and extend their own responses to the canon. Students--post-graduate, graduate, and undergraduate--will derive from it a solid grounding in Heaney's poetry. Individuals interested in contemporary Irish poetry . . . will also discover a great deal of material that will serve as a basis for clarification and development of their own opinions. . . . [Molino's] study will prove to be a very important addition to Heaney scholarship and to the general study of contemporary Irish poetry."" --Michael Patrick Gillespie, Professor of English, Marquette University

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Seamus Heaney, often cited by critics as one of the most important poets writing in English since World War II, has long deserved an integrated critical study such as Michael R. Molino has written here. Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth provides a detailed examination of Heaney's poetry and the political and cultural problems facing literary writers in Ireland today.

Molino demonstrates that Heaney has had to come to terms with a literary tradition that is both a continuation of the past and a break from it. Heaney's poetry springs from a complex cultural debate that is often voiced in monologic terms by groups dedicated to defining an exclusive ""Irish"" tradition. Yet many Irish writers recognize not one but many competing and irreconcilable traditions whose collective, polyphonic voices are often in destructive conflict with each other. Molino rejects the notion that Heaney burrows into archetypes in hopes of discovering or reviving a lost origin or lost ties to the past; he also rejects the notion that Heaney turns to the past in order to evade current political and cultural conflicts facing Ireland. In the author's view, Heaney explores the multiplicity of voices that constitute Ireland's traditions, literature, and history. Amid these voices the British question lingers, as Heaney must acknowledge a debt to the British literary tradition while recognizing Britain's long history of hegemony in Ireland.

This comprehensive, up-to-date study is founded in a variety of critical and theoretical sources, including Heaney's own critical and creative writing, the standard critical assessments of Heaney's poetry, and the influential theoretical writings that emphasize poststructural, social- text, or postcolonial analysis.

Michael R. Molino holds a B.A. degree and an M.A. degree from the University of South Florida and a Ph.D. in English from Marquette University. He is a lecturer in the department of English at the University of Missouri-Rolla. His work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Irish Literature, College English, and Modern Philology.

This work on the poetry of Seamus Heaney offers a complex, but balanced examination of Heaney's themes, political and social allegiances, relationships to literary tradition, and responses to literary-critical movements during the past three decades.