This paper examines Seamus Heaney’s spatial imagination in The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things. Place or space in these works is abstract and unrealistic compared with the real or the mythical one in his earlier poems. But it does not necessarily mean the transcendental or idealistic one, because he attains the new perspective by dialectically negating the real place he was attached to. His newly imagined place acts as a self-diagnosing frame of reference by which he defamiliarizes his real place or his own self so that he can see them from a distance. In this way he redistributes or reterritorializes, through his imagined place in his writing, the real place of Northern Ireland in which powers and violence are embedded. Moreover, Heaney tries to break down the division of the real and the imagined by which he seeks for a new perspective on solving the political problems of Northern Ireland.
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