Bogged Down: Intersections of Past and Present Violence in the Bog Poetry of Seamus Heaney

For my senior integrative exercise, I analyzed the portrayal of Irish national identity and consciousness in Seamus Heaney\u27s bog poems. Using as a jumping off point a 1974 lecture in which Heaney identifies the bogland as Ireland\u27s answering…myth to the American West, I investigated what it means that Heaney regards and writes about the bogland as the quintessential Irish landscape. Close readings of bog poems from four of Heaney\u27s published collections (Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, and North) illuminated the qualities of the bogs (and their contents) that Heaney sees as reflective of an Irish national identity. These close readings supported my argument that the bog poems are a critique of a collective Irish inability to move beyond the past and tendency to perpetuate an ancient culture of violence and intolerance