2026/05/21 by Francesca Petrizzo · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Evelyn Waugh and Hans Urs von Balthasar Studies #Irish and British Studies #Samuel Beckett and Modernism
paper · doi:10.1080/0013838x.2026.2671127
openalex publication_date 2026/05/21 · openalex created_date 2026/05/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article examines systemically for the first time how Seamus Heaney addressed the troubling intersection between his poetic landscape and the IRA men who inhabited it, calling on him through ties of community, shared geography, and politics, using the medium of medievalism (a fluid deployment of the medieval and its imagery). The article first examines this context, framed by medievalist temporal disruption in Sweeney Astray and North. It then discusses the landscape as emotional network through an anthropology of violence and haunting, showing how Heaney mediated his enmeshment in a divided land through Dante. The confluence of landscape and medievalism is then fully realised in Station Island, whose adoption of Dantean motifs atones for the claims by friends and neighbours Heaney felt he had failed. The conclusion brings together the argument in a final view of this tie, and the end of medievalist filters, in Heaney’s final collection, Human Chain.