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Seamus Heaney’s Poetics of Ambivalence

Seamus Heaney was born in Mossbawn whose name represents double origins, both of Irish and Scottish, signifying the poet’s lifelong dilemma as an Irish man living under the influence of England. He confesses himself as being born and living in an in-between world. He often puts contrary or incongruent elements within a poem. In his mind the sea of imagination seems to coexist with the land of strifes. He desires constantly to lead a domestic calm life or indulge in an imaginative ideal poetry writing, but the outside turmoil of the present world and his memories of the unquiet past interrupt his peaceful mind. In many of his poems he expresses this ambivalent situation and his ambiguous stance towards different and sometimes conflicting ideas. His indulgence in creativity observing objects of nature becomes smudged with past memories, oftentimes painful. The contrary elements become crucial in the development of Heaney’s poetry and they turn out to be an essential element of Heaney’s poetics.