Seamus Heaney and John Montague: Place and Identity in Irish Poetry

This present article is an account of the sense of place in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and John Montague. Each poet is approached through poems representative of a rural imaginary of boglands, potato drills, and bodies of water. The line of argument is sensitive to the numinous meanings Heaney and Montague imbue their natural worlds with, and the analysis focuses upon their rootedness and reliance on place for poetic inspiration. In Heaney's account, this is demonstrated with a nuanced and deliberative approach to poems that excavate the historical layerings of the bog while also tying this back to agricultural labor. This yields the source of Heaney’s craft of writing, just as Montague constructs a sort of ars poetica through images of water. This is a brief and comprehensive analysis of both poets and the importance of regionalism in late twentieth-century Irish or Northern Irish poetry.

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