Mapping the Misreadings: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Nationhood
1999; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208797
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
Resumoeamus Heaney's poem Casting and Gathering is dedicated to Ted Hughes and shows two fishermen on opposite of a river: when one man casts, the other gathers / And then vice versa, without changing sides (Seeing Things 13). The image could symbolize the bond between two imaginations that often fished in the same poetic waters, until Hughes's untimely death in 1998. However, both the extent and the nature of Heaney's relation to Hughes have been insufficiently explored. As himself acknowledged, Hughes's rough-hewn nature poetry was a major influence on Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark: I'm a different kind of animal from Ted, but I will always be grateful for the release that reading his work gave me (Seamus Heaney 74). The alliterative quality of Heaney's early poems also recalls Hughes, although it actually points to a shared infatuation with the music of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom discovered before he read Hughes (Corcoran 18-19). Heaney's use of weapons and machines as metaphors clearly echoes Hughes's own penchant for such imagery (Corcoran 45; Parker 45).1 Hughes's popularity in the 1960s had created the climate in which Heaney's first two collections were greeted by critical acclaim. But in Wintering Out
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