Images of Belfast

Seamus Heaney lived for over a decade in Belfast. The city was the site of many formative experiences and he began his career as a poet there, yet his work betrays little fondness for it. This chapter examines Heaney’s evolving relationship with Belfast at a critical moment in the city’s recent history, through his prose, poetry, and work for television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It stresses the importance of other places, specifically Berkeley and Madrid, in reforming his view of Belfast and, informed by contemporary visual theory, it looks closely at his responses to violence in poetry and visual art, and especially the work of Goya, in his developing exploration of the ethics of representation.