Governing the tongue: Heaney among the philosophers

Abstract

Seamus Heaney, whose work spans a period of intense political violence and cultural change in Northern Ireland, is a poet who is keenly aware of the conflicting forces that strive to govern the poet's tongue. This situation has forced him to address, in his poetry and prose, questions about the role of the poet in his or her society, and about the effects which poetry might have on its readers. My aim here is to read Heaney's writing alongside Plato in order to address this question of the relation between poetry and the social world. Rather than setting up philosophy in opposition to poetry, I draw on Heaney's writing as both a challenge and a resource for philosophy; and ask what contribution it can make to the task of developing a non-Platonist philosophy of literature.