it to what Frost called ësupply.í This is ëbuoyancyí in the face of
gravity.
Heaney implies with a sense of occasion, that Frostís poetry has
moments where it defies gravity, moving out beyond what is known in
an imaginative leap or excess: ëWhen Frost comes down hard upon
the facts of hurt, he still manages to end up gaining poetic altitude. As
his intelligence thrusts down, it creates a reactive force capable of
carrying the whole burden of our knowledge and experience.í^72 Here,
it is unclear whether the ëourí alluded to is part of a rhetorical strategy,
(popular perhaps with the Oxford don) or, whether Heaney as
humanist is alluding to some greater sense of ëOur Universal Human
Experienceí. Like Corkery, Heaneyís statement imagines a
community of ëour knowledge and experienceí, that contradicts with
the dividedness and sectarianism that informs his comments else-
where.^73 A ëreactive forceí against the gravities on land is what
motivates the flight into ëwhat we might call cruising altitudeí or ëas
72 Ibid., pp.284ñ5.
73 The lectures express the sense of alienation Heaney feels on Oxford territory as
ëan Irishmaní. Yet Heaney is still able to engage in an academic discourse that
alludes to an imagined community of ëour knowledgeí; he is both insider and
outsider. Heaney describes how Englishness does not have to deal with the
schizophrenia of a fractured history and politics as is experienced in the North
of Ireland. He argues that this is because England has not been invaded since
- Here, Heaney ignores how the terrain of England is not homogenous
since there are radical differences between North and South, East and West,
which are also differences of class, job opportunity, and even speed and time,
whereby Cornwall and the South West are considered ëmore backwardí than
London. In the role of outsider at Oxford Heaney ignores the ëEnglishí
outsiders who are placed beyond a more centralized understanding of English
geography as London and the Home Counties are posited as the national centre.
A comparison can be made between conceptions of English identity and Irish
identity whereby both countries have certain areas that are considered more
authentically ëIrishí or ëEnglishí than others. Both countries experience
localized differences between communities within ëthe nationí. These can be
made less obvious by travel or education, and can be easily identified by
inhabitants of ëthe nationí. There is also an immigrant population living in
England who are ëBritish yet notí. To deconstruct the homogenizing forces of
national identity, it is necessary to become a stranger in or outside the ënative
landí, or at least to acknowledge the unheimlich resting within a national
culture. Rather than looking to assert Irishness in the face of Englishness a more
telling response would be to contest the unity of Englishness.