Chapter 21 - Politics

Summary

A dominant theme running throughout Heaney’s writing was the tension between art and political commitment, between personal vision and the demands of the community. The relationship between his writing and his politics is complex but insistent. Raised in a Catholic family in County Derry with a broadly 'anti-Partitionist stance', he was always alert to social, political and sectarian difference. He claimed his family background was nationalist, with little emphasis on the Republican tradition. His first overtly political journalism appeared during the Civil Rights period. He later found “emblems of adversity” in poetic images of bog bodies which he described in mythic method poems, but he wrote many historical, allegorical and parable poems which were infused with a political undercurrent. Generally he was wary of becoming co-opted by political dogma, but his deepest impulses were compassionate and allied with personal and artistic liberty, human dignity, political freedom, and civil rights.