셰이머스 히니의 「엘리엇에게 배우기」

Seamus Heaney’s Sensibility of Overcoming in “Learning From Eliot”

In “Feeling into Words”(1980) Seamus Heaney reveals his efforts to understand T. S. Eliot’s poetry, while operating his essential “sensibility of overcoming.” Heaney always tried to overcome spiritual obstacles with his positive attitude and inner strength. As for getting over Eliot’s influence, he confesses to feeling as if a “neophyte reader.” This paper, therefore, re-reads “Learning from Eliot” so as to illuminate Heaney’s process of overcoming the American poet’s influence, and seeks to describe how his active engagement with Eliot’s poetry provides him with motivation to control his insecurity and develop his emergent poetics. Comparing himself to an “echo-chamber,” Heaney synthesizes the notion of an “auditory imagination” from Eliot’s discussion of Matthew Arnold. As a so-called echo-chamber, and through a deep understanding of Eliot’s poetry, Heaney reveals his own hand in the making of a poetic self.