Responsibilities

Rooted in the poetry and prose of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and drawing heavily on unpublished material, this final chapter, Chapter 5, finds Seamus Heaney in another university setting, this time in Oxford. Taking its cue from Heaney’s own interest, in The Redress of Poetry, in the question of responsibility, it examines the complex intersections of the imagination with the challenges of contemporary society and the burden of history. It brings Heaney into dialogue with figures as diverse as Coleridge, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Raymond Williams, and it charts the development of two key poems, ‘The Diviner’ and ‘Markings’, in order to illuminate his various expressions of the fraught but necessary interactions between the private artist and their social world.