Eco-Memory in Poetic Formation of Seamus Heaney’s Select Poems

Abstract

The ecological mileau, which a poet chooses to set his poem in, becomes a dominant force that dictates the poetic lines and determines the course of thought of the text. And memories of the past, especially of childhood, are inextricably linked to the physical environment which shapes a poet gifted with remarkable sensibility. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney writes location-specific poems which are often interlinked with the juvenile memories of the days he had spent in the northern countryside. Hence his poems exude a strong aroma of Irishness which encompasses the green, blue and brown shades of nature. The spatio-temporal quality of the effect a landscape creates in a reader distinctly manifests in the poems in Heaney’s collection Electric Light.