277
See also: The Waste Land 213 ■ The Bell Jar 290 ■ Crow 291T
he political, cultural, and
personal landscape of the
generation of poets that
sprang up after World War II was
one scarred by the war’s atrocities
and filled with guilt. Writers and
other artists had a troubled
relationship with the past, whether
public or personal. In the work
of poets such as W. H. Auden,
Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin,
personal relationships often stood
in for wider interactions, and the
memory of the war insinuated
itself in imagery, references,
poetic forms, and style.Memory and change
The first major poetry collection by
Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939–
2013), the successful and acclaimed
Death of a Naturalist, explores the
schism between childhood and
adulthood, past and present as a
version of the division between
a prewar and a postwar world.
Themes and imagery invoke nature,
family, human labor, and rural
Irish landscapes in poems such
as “Blackberry Picking” and“Churning Day.” While there is no
progression of a narrative in the
collection, the 34 poems all revolve
around similar elements of style
and thematics, with natural
imagery used to highlight the
effects of the war upon external
and internal spaces. In the second
poem, “Death of a Naturalist,” a boy
encounters frogs that Heaney likens
to grenades of mud, rupturing the
childhood connection with nature.
The past is also incarnated in
Heaney's family members, his
father in particular. In “Digging”
he shows their now outmoded link
to manual labor and expertise
in older ways of life, recalling his
father digging for potatoes and his
grandfather digging turf. Yet their
labor, after all, is perhaps not too
different from his own, as Heaney
almost apologetically recognizes
writing as a link to his earthier,
more “useful” forebears.
Heaney was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995,
“for works of lyrical beauty and
ethical depth, which exalt everyday
miracles and the living past”. ■POSTWAR WRITING
EVERYDAY MIRACLES
AND THE LIVING PAST
DEATH OF A NATURALIST (1966), SEAMUS HEANEY
IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
Postwar poetryBEFORE
1945 Anglo-American poet
W. H. Auden’s Collected Poetry
includes work on public
politics and the start of his
religious imagery, reflecting
the crisis of modern society.1957 In The Hawk in the Rain,
English poet Ted Hughes
explores love and war through
and alongside the symbolic
lives of animals, showing a
world of struggle mirroring
the one of humanity.1964 English poet Philip
La rk in’s Whitsun Weddings
is a series of poems conscious
of the decline of established
familial and social relations.1965 American poet Sylvia
Plat h’s Ariel, published
posthumously, sees a shift to a
dark and unsettling flow of
imagery, borrowing from the
horrors of war crimes.US_276-277_Catch22_Naturalist.indd 277 03/11/2015 15:22