Seamus Heaney and the Goddess

Abstract

The essay seeks to establish the affiliation of Seamus Heaney to ancient bardic tradition. A close analysis of chosen poems sheds light on Heaney’s approach to interpreting poetry as religious invocation of the White Goddess, presented in Graves’s famous study of poetic myth. Heaney looks for manifestations of the Goddess, who represents natural law and love of instinct and organic life, desacralized by a pragmatic, skeptical, moralizing spirit of the Age of Reason. As well as identifying how the natural and the poetic come together in Heaney’s mythopoeia, the essay examines the impact of the British bardic tradition on the poet’s vision of human condition which depicts modern man in search of his soul.