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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Heaney and Longley: Nativism and Naturalism
In Heaney's poetry, nature, childhood and the collective past are powerfully fused. His ‘sense of place’ stems from ideas of belonging to and dwelling in ‘one dear perpetual place’. The landscape inspires Heaney, not just because it is natural (in the ecological or universalist sense), but also because it is native. His early readings – and creative misreadings – of Wordsworth serve to clarify his own relationship with place and allow him to claim the English poet as a poetic fosterer. Commenting on Wordsworth's famous passage in The Prelude –
The hiding places of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close,
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all; and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel:
And I would enshrine the spirit of the past
For future restoration.
– Heaney elaborates an idea of poetry as archaeology, an exhumation not only of personal but collective memory:
Implicit in these few lines of poetry is a view of poetry which I think is implicit in the few poems I have written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig that ends up bearing plants.
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