This paper aims to examine Seamus Heaney’s poetic use of Irish topography in The Place of Writing. He carries a disinterested investigation, initially, of the land of Northern Ireland but soon expands his imagination to include an abstract community of international poets, writing in each separate territory. His continuous consideration of a poet’s place and his historical place generates a dialogue between the aim of art and its claims of history and between an artist’s growing consciousness and his persistent historical conscience. He makes subtle revelations of such contrary feelings as distant memories of his country and violent anger against historical events he had experienced in the childhood. He presents the topography of Northern Ireland not just in terms of an agricultural mass of land but a collective basin containing the vivid memories of the Irish people. It finally makes him stand in awe of everyday life as well as Irish tradition and history.
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