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Description
Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's entire body of work (including his recent volumes, Seeing Things and The Spirit Level ). It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations. According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of ""the center,"" a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.
South Atlantic ReviewA thorough analysis of Heaney’s oeuvre to date, one that avoids the limitations of formalism and sectarian ideology. -- Irish Studies Review
World Literature TodayA valuable contribution to modern Irish literary scholarship. . . . Invigorating and commendable. -- Modern Language Review
Publication Date
3-11-1999
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
9780813192352
eISBN
9780813147628
Keywords
Seamus Heaney, Religious poetry, Ireland in literature
Recommended Citation
Tobin, Daniel, "Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney" (1999). Literature in English, Ireland. 1.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_ireland/1
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