A Common Quincunx in Seamus Heaney’s Writings: Irish National Culture, European Heritage

Nicoleta Stanca (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania) [BIO]

Email: nicoletastanca@yahoo.com

 

ABSTRACT:

The paper aims to explore the “possibilities of Irishness, Britishness, Europeanness, planetariness, creaturileness, whatever” (“Frontiers of Writing” 200) offered by Seamus Heaney’s poetic and prose writings. Presented by Heaney in his essay “Frontiers of Writing”, as a figure of military architecture and of an integrated literary tradition, the figure of the quincunx, made up of five towers, with five imaginative centres, connects spaces, poets and traditions, offering an Irish pattern to the common European identity: in the centre, “the tower of prior Irelandness”, the “original insular dwelling”; in the south, Kilcolman Castle, Edmund Spenser’s tower, the tower of the linguistic, cultural and institutional Anglicization of Ireland; to the west, Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, the symbol of the poet’s effort to restore the traditional values; in the east, Joyce’s Martello Tower, a symbol of the artist’s attempt to integrate Ireland in the European tradition and, in the north, Louis MacNeice’s Carrickfergus Castle, associated with the Glorious Revolution but also with pre-partitioned Ireland. This integrative model comprises in a nutshell the Northern Irish poet’s vision of Irishness within a larger European frame.